


Comorbidity

by thanotos



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Biblical References, Depression, Drug Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Homophobia, M/M, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Missing Scenes, Past Drug Use, Past Violence, Self Harm, Slurs, Suicide, Zombie Biology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-02-11 17:56:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2077602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thanotos/pseuds/thanotos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they siphoned every piece of Kieren from Simon, they could've buried him in a matchbox. In a thousand years, when archeologists come with pickaxes and hammers to excavate them, he expects they'll find them side by side in a garden of lost souls, just as it should be. They'll find their chalky skeletons lying in the same heap, and that's how it ends.</p><p>When a new virus targets the already pulse-challenged, just as Simon and Kieren are on the mend from the loose stitching Amy left severed, however, PDS face new levels of disdain, cold shoulders, and antipathy from the living as an endemic enters the sphere of the undead splinter group.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Burial of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter names parallel the five parts of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which is always worth reading.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mashup/remix of Simon's pre-rising memories, missing scenes and internal dialogue, and continuation from Amy's funeral. Bit overlapping and fragmentary. No worries, all the action kicks in by chapter 2.

Simon is only eight years old when he understands why God doesn’t reach down to humanity anymore, and it’s all to do with fear.

That’s what enlightenment is. When you expose the fleshy tips of your fingers to a rabid hound, one you want to heal, one covered in bald patches and gouges where feral animals have taken mouthfuls, it will sink its teeth. Of course it sinks its teeth, it will always sink its teeth. When you bite into a heart like you would a ripe pomegranate, as blood seeps into your teeth and seeds fills your mouth, it will always bite back. When firemen rescue cats from burning buildings, the cats don’t jump willingly into their arms. They hiss and shriek and claw out their eyes.

Humans are no better than scorpions, designed with Darwinian blueprints to sting, hit-or-miss, the hand that feeds them. Any hand. They have pincers and venom and claws. God's likely given up trying to tape the humans together again.

 

* * *

 

Lying in that hospital bed for the last time, it’s like he’s eight years old again and he’s scraped his knee, the time he tells his mother he’s fine because he doesn’t want another ace bandage, because he doesn’t want the iodine to sting, because he doesn’t want to be patched up. He shields his wound with his own hands as blood spurts between his fingers and he’s saying he’s fine as his palms gush with it and it trickles down his legs. He’s pulling his sleeves over his puncture wounds, like he’s hiding pills between couch cushions. Like he’s slipping lighters and bent, corroded spoons under his bed.

If you’re ever plummeting off a skyscraper, the doctor says, you’re supposed to go limp. Your bones move with the force from falling and absorb the shock. If you go rigid, your cartilage and ligaments and tendons tear, because your muscles pull the ends of the bones to compress them. Deer stare straight into headlights, that doesn’t seem to work out for them. They die with their eyes wide open. It’s why cars have crumple zones, if you go stiff you’re more likely to break. But, see, humans always go stiff. Evolution wasn’t ready for humans to jump off bridges.

 

* * *

 

In the ecclesial community his parents are a part of when he’s a kid, you’re considered a monstrosity if you don’t attend mass every Sunday. Simon decides to make it a learning experience.

The chapel’s full of chanting, ominous organ harmonics ringing like a gong, an echo of an echo of an echo, and the pungent scent of dead flowers, the sinister eye slits of jagged windows like serpents, always watching and ready to strike. And the priest, he’s less of a clerical type and more of a dealer, a skilled merchandiser with a silver tongue. Peddling salvation as a trade for a bit of earthly drudgery, selling stocks in redemption in place of damnation. Leasing property in the empyrean, at a markdown price.

He meets Michael there, the boy who takes no interest in any of it and acts out in Sunday school, squirming under the gaze of wary-eyed parish members. Simon's young, and already suspects there's something defective about himself, in the way he'd rather pass notes to Michael or sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Michael or touch Michael's face than he would any of the pretty little girls there. Still, he's an obedient boy. He shuts up about it.

“St. Jerome, creator of the Vulgate translation of the Bible, wrote of a synagogue,” Father Clement booms, “‘If you call it a brothel, a den of vice, the Devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever you will, you are still saying less than it deserves.’”

He likes that. Not the tenor, but the way it sounds in the crinkled old man’s mouth. To be honest, the Father is narrow-minded, overly orthodox, and vaguely anti-semitic, but he sells his loathing so well Simon is fascinated.

He bellows in a baritone deeper than brass, “Babylon, you are my war club, my weapon for battle—with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms!”

Simon memorises the verses. He puts the wafer in his mouth, drinks the blood.

“Lift up a banner in the land! Blow the trumpet among the nations! Summon against her these kingdoms: Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz. Appoint a commander against her; send up horses like a swarm of locusts.” He rattles the podium and the gossamer pages tremble between his fingers.

There are moments of absolute silence as everyone makes temples out of their hands, bow their heads and apparently talk to God. Or talk _at_ God. Simon hates these long silences, because that’s what they are, and he wonders if they’re supposed to be.

 

* * *

 

Three young boys, sons of edge-of-town hicks with cotton shirts and shaved heads and broken baby teeth, one with a hammer in his belt loop and another wielding a butterfly knife, drag a black, malnourished dog by its tattered ear to a field in the moor.

Simon's just a year younger, a short-legged kid tripping over his own feet. He sees them clambering through the sparse scrublands, and he's curious. He hides in some weeds behind a herdsman's barbed wire fence, where cigarettes have been stamped into the grass and leave the scent of tobacco. The dog is limping with a mangled whimper and saliva dripping from his jowls, gnawing at its own paws. It's got a leg twisted in a corkscrew, in the wrong direction.

One of the boys presses a fist to its neck, and Simon feels it behind his eyes.

The three children seem to have a leader, the one with scraped knees and rolled-up sleeves. He tosses the cowering dog to the ground, pegs it down as it begins to gnaw on his fingers and salivate in total, wild, ravenous appetite. He threatens it with a hammer, but the hound doesn’t seem to understand. It bares its teeth. He lifts the mallet, claw first, above its raised head.

 

* * *

 

Simon guesses at what happens after he’s put temporarily out of his misery; some GP pronounces him dead and his parents take him to a funeral parlour. An undertaker covers him with some kind of powder to hide his polychromatic lesions and bloodshot, drugged-up eyes. He probably has some stupid, parent-pleasing smile on his face. That’s how his life ends and restarts. Just different ways of concealing ugly truths.

When they wheel him out on a bier, Father Clement gives some monologue about how righteously he lived his life, how sad he was to go. Something from Corinthians would be nice; "Where, O Death, is your victory: where, O Death, is your sting?" Maybe some of them cry, plenty of people cry during his usual sermons. Maybe they’re relieved.

His mother reads poetry. That’s all he wanted, to be dust and ashes and for his mother to read poetry from some moth-eaten book like he’s come full circle and it’s over now.

 

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” 

 

Death, Simon guesses, is a bit like drinking yourself to sleep. They got it right, when they thought up the rivers of Hades, he decides. You empty a lot of bottles and forget with each one what life was like. It sounds a bit like a coma, or a long blackout in a CVS in which everyone around you becomes anonymous silhouettes but there seems to be line you’re at the end of, like maybe you're waiting for a prescription. Being rabid was like gulping down all the liquor of the world, overdosing, except the EMTs never turn up to pump your stomach.

Simon kept his funeral suit. It was the nicest suit his parents bought for him. His family was never very well off, and it more than made up for the bail they’d be paying if he went on much longer, anyway. He doesn't remember clawing through the wet dirt out of his coffin, like all of The Risen did, like banished wraiths clambering with bloody fingernails from the hallowed core of the earth. The suit was barely tarnished.

Somehow, this brings back his childhood memories of trips to the dentist. When he’s little, his parents spend so much money on his teeth; filling cavities, polishing enamel, drilling, varnishing, _fixing_. They know it will be years and years until his back feels a dentist’s chair. All the while, he has the vaguest suspicion they also want to be able to identify his body.

A lot of people committed suicide the year before The Rising. A lot of people died in kitchen accidents. A few of them were found still wearing toe tags, with confidential records on their own unsolved murders.

Simon's heard a million of the billions of ways people met the repo man before the fateful resurrection. Flaying, stoning, disembowelment. In ancient empires, they used to kill people with ash. They’d put their traitors in a room piled with it and wait for it to fill their lungs. The king of Persia promised he wouldn't die by sword, by poison, or by hunger, so his half-brother made sure he suffocated slowly.

Rebel high priests. Royal renegades. Martyrdom operations that end in death all the same. Guts and glory, but mostly guts. They would have come back still spitting up embers, like they'd been swallowing matches all they’re lives, like they're about to be struck.

Simon always wanted to go like one of those heroes. Like Hercules. Force Charon at gunpoint to ferry him into Hades. Go to hell and back. He'd imagine filling a bathtub to the brim and dropping in electrical appliances one by one (answering machine, processor, electric kettle, space heater), taste-testing pesticides, taking out some life insurance, leaving coins on his eyes to settle the transit debt, and that would take him one way. For a while, he thought he could fight his way out.

His mother doesn't have a kind voice, but she knows how to read the meter and lines.

 

"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath."

 

Simon used to want to be a hero. He refuses to forget. Escaping to the states, like in a movie with a happy ending. Now, he only wants to go quietly, into oblivion. To disappear.

The marble orchard in the churchyard, the garden of lost souls, the potter’s field of memorials to nameless tramps, is crammed tight with crooked, megalithic tombs covered in burial mounds. Cinerary urns in columbaria you might walk over if you’re not careful, sepulchral cists about the size and shape of a telephone booth, with just enough space for a mourner to step inside and kneel to say a prayer. Shrines to various saints covered in cobwebs, inhabited by other life.

All these people in these provincial backlands, they’ve been hand-reared to keep quiet about pain. Growing up, it’s enough to survive and tally with the craggy moors and isolation, the sort of paranormal tracts of heath where wolves eat sheep and harpies are meant to gobble you up if you wander far.

Maybe that’s what breeds such parochial herds of good Christians, out there in pastures and mires. God-fearing. You’ve got to be scared. You outlive the very last, and that means masking yourself in a flock of people who’s lives are keeping body and soul together, nothing more.

As a kid, he remembers lachrymose, cobbled churches hoary old women with moth-eaten shawls and faces like furrowed knitting claim are built by druids. It’s all just a bit like some Celtic fairytale. Irish vampires, headless horsemen, banshees in carts drawn by six black horses she whips with a human spinal cord. When there are daemons and witches and sea serpents breathing fire, it’s so much easier. He only has to avoid thick mist and cast superstitious charms, play-acting at being a necromancer and banishing all the beasts of the fenlands. Children romp among the caved-in sepulchres and rubble of fortresses stretching to the sea like it’s an Arcady empire they’d once tried to conquer, but instead recoiled in fear.

They each think they're meant to be the chosen one, the lionheart, the king’s champion in a trial by combat (even Simon, when he's young), because that’s what they all are. An Irish airman foresees his death. Oisin’s Quest. Epic poems and dramas and fables. And then he’s the monster, and it wasn’t meant to be that way but he’s ripping through the throats of sinless livestock and realises there’s no saviour for him, certainly not himself.

 

* * *

 

There’s all the chemical burns and pieces carved out of him and left to rot after he’s poked and prodded at the treatment centre like a lab rat, like a taxidermic rodent stuffed and sewed shut.

The electrodes they fasten to the base of his skull and down the back of his neck, he expects Kieren must feel the little cavities every time he runs his fingers through Simon’s hair and he shouldn’t be ashamed of that by now. They don’t talk about it. They keep their eyes mostly to the ground, they’ve got a knack for it.

The night after Amy’s send-off, which feels more like a colourful parade of skeletons wearing coats of paint to cover their smeared up insides, the light thaws, oozing to the periphery of the sky. Simon promised he wouldn’t leave, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to leave the house. There’s iridescent light coming from the whites of Kieren’s eyes even as they slump side by side on the couch in the sitting room, exhausted, with the lights off after Kieren’s parents and Jem have long since gone to sleep.

Maybe the apostles and popes and bishops got it wrong, and God is some lax old mortician performing autopsies. He cracks open the jaws and says, “How funny, this one’s been burnt to a crisp, but his teeth are still there.” He does that every time. He laughs and says, “This one’s been digested by the earth. This one’s been chewed apart by worms underground. Now there’s a full set, little molars hanging onto their enamel.” He pulls out a the jaw from a sad bag of bones. “Just look at those pearly whites.”

Kieren finally says, with a sheepish smile, “I’m off to bed.” Simon looks at him devoid of expectancy or a will to leave. Simon doesn’t say _I think I came back from the dead for you. I will always come back from the dead for you._ Kieren says, “You can kip on the sofa, if you like.”

Simon wants more than anything to stay as close to Kieren as he can, circumstances permitting. Kieren leads him to his bedroom. He sleeps on the floor. He makes a pillow out of his jacket and lays as near as he can to Kier. No need for a blanket, he doesn’t feel the draft coming under the door. One of the perks of being dead.

God rips his flesh from Simon's bones and laughs some more. "He's practically mulch in here. And his skin's decayed, his insides are rotting. But his bones are as perfectly formed as porcelain." He lifts organs and entrails, now burrows for insects and hives for wasps, not as colourful as they used to be. They used to be so fulvous red and rope-burn rouge and spilling out like fermented wine. God turns him inside out, and he's the same colours. "Humans are funny. Look at all of this cutlery they've stocked inside. All their mother's best silver. They think they'll be able to sell it for more than pennies and nickels."

Simon is looking dead-ahead at the ceiling. Kieren is, as well. They can both feel each other staring at the same plane, at the same flat heavenly body.

Simon and Kieren, both, have had so much training being mute and putting up smokescreens. They’ve nothing to say and no way to say it. Introverted, alexithymiac, withdrawn into dumbness like a dark cerement veiling of useless remarks and assurances. Words would be hieroglyphs, anyway. Or snake pits; if you trip, you’ve fangs in your neck within seconds. The silence says: This is braille for the deaf and an ideogram for the blind. It’s less of a gamble to launch a mutiny against all speech, to only blink messages in morse code. Silence is a burial shroud.

 

When you’re alive, you get used to your own biorhythm. You don’t even notice your pulse except in the dead of night; even Simon remembers that flimsy yet naively eager (almost hungry) hammering in his neck, through his fingers, an artless hammer clobbering his bloodstream. Now his own veins are quiet as a morgue.

God is talking right at him, while scribbling something on his postmortem report. Like a dentist giving the usual news, "Those two tiny ossicles in your inner ears were the jawbones of a reptile. Your cardiac muscles replace themselves so slowly you'll have the same heart all your life, but your skeleton is remade every ten years. Even yours, though you haven't much of a blood flow. Your calcium, that's ancient.”

 

* * *

 

One of the older boys sees Simon from the top of his head as he ducks to the ground. He calls with a Lancashire snarl, "Hey, y'little shite, ye wanna see somethin’?” They've made a circle around the animal, like a jeering crowd around a cockfight or plebeians around gladiators in a pit.

Simon wants to rescue the dog. Despite everything, it's part of who he is. He runs to the snivelling mongrel with its face against the dirt. He pushes the boys aside, they're roaring with laughter while he plants his knees next to the sad beast and feels its side.

When his back is turned, the oldest boy swings his hammer aimlessly, miming at smashing Simon's head in. Simon pulls himself around and grabs it in sudden, primeval ferocity. Their smirks are wiped off their faces and replaced with something like dumb fear. Glancing at the dog, heaving and covered in its own blood, with six jagged pairs of ribs pushing against its canvas of skin, Simon takes aim at one boy's leg with the hammer and _swings_.

 

* * *

 

The hospital bracelet tight around his wrist from his last overdose, after which his addict friend, Jaime, comes straight to the ER and they shoot up right there, cross-legged on the too-white sheets. The pink halos circling his forearm reappear after his death, along with the mottled blue under where the needle goes in, the lash marks from where he tightens a tourniquet from the straps at each side of the bed. Even those won’t fade entirely. 

“You’re gonna off yourself, mate, if you take any more of this,” Jaime slurs as it kicks in their heads like flame to a chemistry set.

To talk to God, you’d better be full of morphine. He gives the best answers when he thinks you’re taking your last breaths.

“Probably.”

His friend gives him a look of pity. That sets Simon off, a bit.

No one will answer your prayers until your veins are bursting with anaesthetic. No one answers your prayers until you're six feet under the ground.

He sneers like the Grimm's fairy tale variety of villain he is. “No, scratch that. _Hopefully._ Letting go of everything and getting eaten up by all this bad medication is much harder than anyone gives me credit for. I deserve a _reward_.”

And it is, in fact, more difficult to die than expected. It was supposed to be the easy option, but it was hard. Survival instincts, hanging on by their teeth. It’s a fucking labor of love, dying. You have to want it more badly than anything.

 

* * *

 

Another thing about being a walking corpse; when Simon has nightmares they’re about his mother and the memories he doesn't have of her. He wakes up in what he expects to be a cold sweat, but he can’t feel anything and it all comes back, that same nonpartisan fact that he destroyed her. 

PDS sufferers don’t even have to breathe to stay alive, but he gasps out of reflex and clutches at his face and it’s frigid, more glacial than you’d ever expect. How hot is a human body inside, thirty-seven degrees? And now he’s a fucking icebox. He feels smashed to smithereens. Amy’d tell him about hearing him screaming at four in the morning, followed by dead silence. She wouldn’t broach the subject again, after his coolheaded denial of flashbacks (“just a spontaneous thing, I suppose”) and not-so-reassuring smile like it’d all be okay in the morning. Even she knows when to leave something spoiled outside for the flies.

God says, "There's much to be said about intestines. People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake in the emergency room. Wolves drag them from the lower stomach. They say you can climb them into heaven." He lifts one up, long and shining and tied in knots. "And don't get me started on the kidneys. What colour do you think yours are?" He grins at Simon with a gleam in his eyes. "Shall we give you and open-heart surgery? Who knows what obscured relics we'd find buried deep in those caverns?"

A dog howls outside, somewhere between hound and Rottweiler and bull terrier and wretched terror. Certainly not housetrained. Maybe sick, maybe feral. Maybe hunting a fresh kill.

He's still in Kieren's bedroom. Kieren takes a stab at the gagging soundlessness. “Have you ever heard of dysthanasia?”

Simon turns over. He wasn’t even sure Kieren knew he was still here. So, neither of them can sleep. “Like euthanasia? Like those mercy killings they're always talking about on the news?"

“Like the arch nemesis of euthanasia. It’s when, with life support and defibrillators, technology keeps people artificially alive. Even after cardiac failure, up until brain death. You just have human mannequins, floating around and attached to tubes.” Kieren’s rather clever, really. He could have held his own at a college, even something more advanced than his previous plans. He could’ve been a doctor or a scientist.

Simon has an idea of what Kieren's got on his mind. “Don’t think about that shite. We’re not on life support.”

Now they're in a pub, full of people in a line, waiting for their orders to come in little paper bags soaked in something thick and coagulated. God is reading from the menu. "There's your left lung, tendency to become dependent. Right lung is addiction. Retinas for the awkward family dinners while your eyes are bloodshot. Trachea for when you get a therapist, and she just gives you more pills. Shall I go on?"

“Aren’t we? Aren’t we just extending a dying process?” Kieren’s got regret in his voice. He didn’t mean to say it. He cuts himself off like he wants to salvage it, but gets lost between the words and sentences required to reclaim a lifeline and leaves it stale, an open-ended statement.

“No, we’re not. Or if we are, I’m enjoying it. Dying with you, even if I were paralysed from the neck down or in a coma or practically senile. It’d be alright.” And it would. It really would.

God says, "Here's your entire, dislodged neck. For when your father dreams about smothering you with a pillow the first night you come home. For when the boy in the ocean holds your head underwater for thirty full seconds and there's salt in the back of your throat for hours." He doesn't mind being drowned. Simon remembers this, and he wants to be drowned. 

The worst part is, he's going to survive this.

After a few speechless minutes, Kieren's arm has spilled from the side of the bed, and hangs limply near Simon. His hand searches blindly for him, and Simon reaches up to his thin, pale fingers. They’re trembling, and, he could swear, feel warm. Kieren’s entire presence is warm. He’s a fucking asteroid, or a supernova. Simon weaves his hands in his, twirling around his fingertips. He’s a funeral pyre. He always said he wanted to be cremated; he doesn’t think they could’ve finished the job.

"Grey matter, cerebrum, brain stem; that's every time you thought about sticking your head in the oven." The list goes on, like in an anatomy textbook. God is a biology professor giving a lecture over the vivisected body of a frog, except the frog is Simon and the classroom is full of jars of him. Skin grafts under microscopes. Skull on a shelf like a stuffed deer over a mantle. "The tongue we've kept in this beaker, that's for every gallon of dish soap you've dreamt of swallowing."

After death, they tell him in church, there's St. Thomas, guardian at the gates of judgement, waiting to look over all the sinner's hands. Thomas, who doubted Christ's ability to rise from the dead tallying up his wounds. Nails driven into palms. Spears in the side of the stomach. What gritty things would they find between Simon's fingers, he wonders? He's supposed to go to hell for three days and then come back, right?

Simon’s hand travels up Kieren's arm and traces his scar with his index finger. Thumb agains the staples clasping shut the canvas of his skin, enfolding him. In return, his fingers curl loosely around the fleshy part of Simon’s arm he’d liked to stab hypos into like he’s a harbour in a hurricane. _We are singing now while Rome burns, the kingdom of God is within you because you ate it_. Simon's heart doesn’t surge or skip or leap or lurch like it’s supposed to, but it still seems as if the world’s stopped its reeling and flung him at a breakneck velocity into thin air.

It’s easier in the jet-black darkness to look at Kieren. In broad daylight, it feels like Simon can only look at him through his lashes. Stare at the space between his eyelids through tricky sentences while he avoids his gaze through the pauses. You’re not supposed to look directly at a solar eclipse, right? But, then, there’s always the choice of going blind like you’d choose your favourite hymn to make you deaf. Your preferred execution. Be it guillotine, firing squad, or the hands of a sad teenager on your wounds.

Kieren was saying, just yesterday, "Vincent van Gogh swallowed yellow paint to get it inside of him. The paint was lead and it hurt him so bad, but he thought it was happiness and decided he wanted it to fill him up."

God is saying, "And here, in this tank, we have your still-beating heart. We don't know what that's for. Maybe you won't be needing it, anymore. Maybe you get to give it out to whoever you choose, not that we'd recommend that for sustaining a heartbeat."

Why do moths go to a flame even after it’s burnt them every time before? Survival, again. A way of survival that kills them in the end. It’s not as sad as it is lovely, that they would try again and again despite the pain, like they’re thirsty for the sun. After they’d all have been wiser to love the dark, that they would love the light despite their being mere insects catching their wings on fire.

They fall asleep that way, hands on each other’s wrists. Like they could repair each other. As if they would even want to repair each other.

 

* * *

 

 

Four whitewashed walls and one flickering light. Simon is slumped underneath ferocious, maroon letters: “Rotters = Monsters,” dripping from above his head like a broken crown. Wind roars through the fuming throat of the tunnel, the atrium of some snarling beast coming to life in the visceral walls around him. Whether the blue-black smears on the ground in the heaps of abandoned gear around him are zombie blood is anyone’s guess.

He’d like to melt into plasma and dissolve into the wall. One of his colour contacts digs at his eye. The words are ringing in his head like church bells: “ _You don’t deserve to look at her._ ” The heels of his feet grind on the cement as he pulls his knees closer to his stomach.

Father Clement is speaking now, like thunderclaps, “Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon has devoured me, he has crushed me, he has made me an empty vessel, he has, like a monster, swallowed me up, he has filled his maw with my delicacies; he has spit me out.”

“I don’t want them to see me like this.” His eyes have lost all pigment, are ghostly freckles of what they used to be. The lacklustre veins in his wrist are stygian black without oxygen.

“Babylon will be a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and scorn, and a hissing, without inhabitant."

Tongue shredder, malay boot, electroshock, heretic’s fork, breaking wheel, serrated blade, instep borer. In Assyria, kings would flay people alive until they weren't alive anymore. They seared the flesh from the bones and hung it on racks. They dressed the city with it as a warning to rebel leaders. Christian mobs of Nitrian monks did it to pagans. They draped columns with it, threw it in mounds of charred bones.

“No, I promise they won’t.” In their lab coats, the two doctors stand armed at the ready like angels coming for his redemption. Angels used to not have wings. They shielded people from evil, they didn't fly away. They might be stitched up with animal parts, but they were meant to guard the mercy seat. The spinning light becomes the light of the tunnel.

"We are ashamed, because we have heard reproach: shame has covered our faces.” 

“Until I’m fixed.” In Latin, monster first meant ‘divine portent.’ Like the Sphinx, like holy spirits, messengers and heralds of sacred omens. It was the angels who were steeled for battle in heaven, more like sanctified security guards. When did the monsters become such malignant brutes and angels become benevolent?

"A destroyer will come against Babylon; her warriors will be captured, and their bows will be broken… The Lord—The Lord is a God of retribution; he will repay in full. We are ashamed… shame has covered our faces. Shame has covered our faces.”

He cuts his hand on the broken glass of the frame his father smashed. It doesn't hurt or bleed. He tapes the photo together again.

“Until you’re fixed.”

 

* * *

 

The oldest boy clutches his knee. It's gushing blood, sprained and buckling under him. The one with the butterfly knife and the one in command, with fresh welts crisscrossing their palms, stumble fast away, screaming jumbled insults of "schizo" and "freak" and "psycho". Simon puts down the bloody head of the hammer at his side and turns to the animal with its knees bent like a swan bagged after a hunt. When he reaches out to touch its head, it yelps and bites him.

There's a low growling in the dog's stomach and she's infested with fleas, with raw flesh where her left ear was. Simon tries again, to lift her up and carry her somewhere, anywhere they'd allow a boy with a sick dog in his arms. Whenever he gets close, she lashes out. He's got gashes of red running between his fingers.

There are sharp pebbles under his knees, and he thinks he must be trying to pray, but he’s shouting and swearing like sputtering gravel and if some great Jehovah offered a divine intervention he might not take it out of spite.

He runs to his house, to his first aid kid and rolled up gauze bandages. A naive little boy who thinks he can fix anything with sticking plasters and band-aids, he ties knots around her displaced leg. She's so weak, but uses every bit of her remaining will to live nipping at his stubby fingers. He's crying now, leaking out his eyes and nose and shaking noiselessly with blood pooling in his hands. She won't let him get close. She's scared half mad. He only wanted to help.

 

* * *

 

He's eighteen years old now, and he's nailed a latch to his closet door and rammed it shut from the inside. There's this print taped up on the inside wall, the focal point of Michelangelo's _The Creation of Adam_ where God and man's fingers get so close to touching, so close to one single synaptic nerve sparking back and forth. But didn't they notice? Their fingers don't quite make it all the way. 

He doesn't go to church, now, he tries new chemicals while laying down in the pews after confessions like a dirty picture tucked into a bible. There's this giant altar of a crucifix under the east arcade, Christ with a knotted brow sending thunderbolts down to Simon's usual spot. It's somehow satisfying, to see that canonised fury, to look it in the eyes and dry swallow every pill he has.

God's tied to a wooden chair, and that's his throne. Christ is covered in thorns, and that's his crown. His whole empire, all the dirt and worms. Take a look at your lambs, if you're such a good shepherd. They're all getting wrecked and striking out and cutting themselves apart under your feet.

He cares very little about anything. There's that boy, Michael, who he thinks he's in love with because he's always got plenty of Tylenol and he's always too drunk to talk. It's easy to kiss him sloppily, hands blindly running somewhere near his mouth, under the stadium floodlights when they're both seeing double. They shut up about it until next Friday when they can knock back a bit of diazepam. 

Then it is the next Friday, and he kisses him, and he doesn’t pull away, so he keeps on kissing him. He hasn’t moved, like maybe he’ll never forgive him, maybe now he’ll leave Simon alone. But he doesn’t. Simon says something like, “I think I could find my way out of the land of the dead for this, I think my blood will be magnetised and pull me forever until I get back to you. Like cloaked pilgrims making their way barefoot to Mecca, just to suffocate in a tunnel.” Michael says, "Peel and pop." And they do.

This is the kind of story where everyone survives, but it’s not a happy ending.

 

* * *

 

Simon nearly wishes he'd had some memory of how he killed his mother. Whether or not he dug under her scalp and took her brain apart, layer by wet, wrinkled layer. If his father did anything or if he was paralysed by fear. All he can hear is her reading, still, reading from Keats in a page he'd left open on his floor. 

 

"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!”

 

His mother taught him to palm read; You’ve got the life line, Solomon’s ring, and the Plain of Mars Temper. You’ve got a heart line, and then you’ve got The Girdle of Venus, which is a second heart line. Simon asks her what happens if you cut your own lines to pick and choose your fate, and she tells him it doesn’t count.

He buys a pack of tarot cards from an antiquities shop while on a trip to the seaside. He’s been clipping horoscopes from magazines for months. His father asks if he intends to become a clairvoyant, casting an accusatory glance at his mum: _you’ve got him into this superstitious nonsense._ Simon shuffles through the cards, picks a drowning Phoenician Sailor, Lady of the Rocks, man with three staves, the Wheel, and a one-eyed merchant, and one last blank card. There’s no Hanged Man. His mother says that means death by water. He puts them back and picks new cards, until he gets an ending he likes. Quits cheap mysticism cold turkey.

 

* * *

 

He doesn't know for how long he has been, but Simon seems to be dreaming. Like in all his dreams, he sees himself the way he did when he finally started looking in mirrors again. Empty crevasses that were his eyes smeared across his face like empty tabernacles, empty churches with broken stained-glass windows and blindfolded sanctums. From the waist down he is a crypt. His arms are spires, bending over in prayer. It's like something he'd read on a ULA mission statement. _If God is gone, then we are our own churches. Abandoned, holy, arching like the gates of heaven. We, the hallelujahs. The amens. The dirges. The absolutions._

We, the sad, frothing dogs worshipping at the shrines of those who turned us to wolves. Like wolves, we forget their names and learn that all meat is good meat.

He's in a body bag, now. It's hugging him like a second skin, and he's awake but there's no zipper from the inside (why would there be a zipper on the inside of a body bag?) and he can't get out. He's dimly aware of other bodies lined up on either side of him, though they make no movement or sound.

He recognises his own garden, the one behind his house, by the moor, by the dim outline of planters and rows of hyacinths. It’s full of bagged-up casualties the way a serial killer’s attic is full of skeletons. _That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?_

He remembers this poem. He remembers hearing it, tucked in late at night, like a bedtime story. How does it go? _Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men; Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!_

He asks the surrounding bodies questions: “Who are you? Do I know you?” Dead men tell no tales. They don’t speak at all. Not these ones, at least.

Simon can hear voices. He recognises the muttering of the two doctors from the treatment centre, discussing a new test they've developed.

"He's dead, he doesn't feel anything," one of them is saying. "Let's go on with the experiment." Simon opens his mouth to protest, to tell them he's still alive, but the thick cloth cushions every sound he makes. The operation involves a drill, a razor blade, handfuls of crushed glass. He focuses all his strength on his outstretched arms, pushing on either side of him. He starts screaming. He can hear every word they're saying. "This will be painless," they say. They're scrawling words on clipboards, just like God. "He won't feel a thing."

His mother is there, and his father, and John and Michael and Jaime and Kieren. Ghosts from his past, fallen war comrades. And one of them, all of them, any of them, have their hands around his neck and suddenly the black polyester is a plastic grocery bag and he's kicking around on a tiled floor. He has a gun, and he wants to shoot whoever it is in the head but it's spinning now, far out of his reach.

The grip tightens, wrangles the plastic apart. Simon is sure it must be one of the doctors, but then it's Michael. He's saying, "The things that you fear, you learn to love them." The plastic rips in shreds in his fists. The gun points at Michael, then Simon, then another blank wall. The veins in Simon's neck are turning purple. Baudelaire’s Paris, Dickens’s London, and Dante’s hell are meant to be the same in the end. He doesn’t know why he remembers that now. He’s still talking: ”A guard dog defends its master to its dying breath, even if the master beat it to bruises with clubs and rods and sticks. It's masochistic. It expects and wants the pain.”

Jaime is saying, "Once you've learnt to love what you fear, the two become indistinguishable." The gun spins faster now, barrel staring down Simon's legs, then his eyes, then the corner of the room. It's so hard to breathe. How wonderful and terrible. 

And then Kieren is saying, in the wrong voice, in Simon's voice, which is slithering and double-edged like a long dagger and entirely unlike his own, "You'll want to shoot everybody you love, dead-centre. You'll want to hide from them, you'll want to push them off cliffs." Simon's own hands are around his neck, now, and he's looking at himself through a grimy mirror in a washroom. "You love them all so deep and tenderly. You'll love them until you forget their names and hunt them down." The gun goes off, but he doesn't see where.

Simon wakes up on the floor of Kieren's room. Kieren's moved down, in a concerned, bent-over position looking quizzically into Simon's face. Simon has his hands around Kieren's neck, which is surprising and horrifying and entirely wrong. His bony fingers in rows like boxes in a catacomb, and Kieren looking over them, Kieren's throat stretched underneath them. He somehow manages to put kindness in his eyes, though they're just a glassy film around an axe wound of a pupil.

There's a cliche about that, isn't there? " _I could just drown in his eyes._ " The Shakespearean “ _those pearls that were his eyes. Look!_ ”But Kieren's eyes are more like an antigravity chamber, sealed and compressed with deoxygenated blue veins around the edges. You could stretch or implode or be flung in particles to the walls of his eyes, and you'll never know which until you step inside without a spacesuit.

Simon never used to sleepwalk or even snore. Kieren's unfazed (asphyxiation doesn't affect PDS, of course) and as he sees Simon's eyes open his expression shifts from active worry to amusement.

"How's that working out for you?" His voice is his own, again. He looks down the bridge of his nose to Simon's now half-hearted attempt at murder. “You'll have to aim a bit higher, next time." 

Simon self-consciously releases his grip. He is suddenly furious, not at the joke but at himself. Stupid, stupid, how did he let this happen? How'd Kieren find himself on the floor? Did he wake him up? Did Simon hurt him somehow (it's still possible, in a way)? "That's not funny. Are you alright?"

"Kind of hard not to be. My nervous system's bullocks, lately."

"You know what I meant. You sound like Amy." There's a brief silence as Simon shifts from between Kieren's knees and sits up. He has to leave. He can't be here. He doesn't know if he could bring himself to be unkind to Kieren, but he might have to be if it will keep him away for a while. Just long enough, for Simon to lick his wounds alone and come back when there's no risk.

"Going somewhere?" Simon's already grabbing his jacket.

"Yeah. Yeah, I should definitely leave. Don't follow me." _The gun went off, and I don't know who it hit_. He finds the door silently and exits with a cruel step. _Stay away, stay far away for as long as you can._

He can't get to sleep again, but he still hears the words.

 

"Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 

Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?"

 

* * *

 

The man next door beats his dog. He comes home at three and smashes a bottle over her head. She learns to hide in the darkest corner of the chain-link fence. One night he swings open the back door with booze flaming in his oversized gut and she's ready for him, she pounces and clamps on to his ankles and doesn't let go. He has his boys put her down. 

Two days later, Simon finds the dog dumped next to his family's bins, out in the street with its skull crushed to a pulp. Like they found her again, tracked her down, and decided to teach Simon a lesson. Simon wants to bury her and give her a proper funeral, though nobody seems to so much as remember her name, but his father takes one look at the crumpled body leaking onto the sidewalk (a funny raspberry colour, not the scarlet smear you'd expect) and says something like, "Dogs are animals. They don't get funerals."

Still, he gets a shovel from the shed and goes out to the moor, digs a deep pit and lays the dog inside. After they've filled it back up, Simon marks the spot with a stone. Maybe when he's dead, Simon thinks, his father will bury him in the same ignominious way, wrapped in a towel and covered unceremoniously in rubble ten metres from the garden. He still hopes for something more archaic, more Herculean, like it matters once he's gone like she's gone. All the thousands of warriors in the fall of every Babylon had to be buried. Did they have time to dig all those pits, or did they just pile them in?

They found mass graves in Neolithic cities full of skeletons with wounds in their skulls. Turns out violence is a primeval human trait. Megalithic tombs covered in earthen mounds. Necropolises, abandoned fossil factories of prodigal sons full of arrowheads. That's what this will be, in a few thousand years.

Simon imagines, he could have dug the dog back up. He could have nursed her back to health, the bones in her leg weaving miraculously together. He could have at least put up a plaque and given her a name. Rabbits sometimes kill themselves getting too worked up, contracting heart attacks when they're anxious. She was too afraid to live.

He's eighteen again, and he visits the grave. He's not even sure it's the right place, just some patch of marshy land where grass doesn't grow anymore. He remembers how damn stubborn she was, how she wouldn't accept any help. Stupid dog. He scrawls in the dirt with one finger, "Here lies the easiest way to die." Here lies his shame, here lies his refusal of divine intervention, and here lies every time he poured salt in his wounds. Here lies missed doses and lethal injection.

Now, he's been brought back to life and he's terrified of going back to his father's house, his last place of living and the final resting place of the dog he didn't save. He does, though, after dark when the lights are off. He has to be brave because Kieren is brave, and he tells himself he's the one who taught him that. This time he drags a piece of driftwood, big enough for the rows of houses to see from their backyards, in gaunt, angular letters. "Here lies the easiest thing to live for."


	2. A Game of Chess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shift to Kieren's POV, his past with Rick, his feelings for Simon, and his struggle to live (and die) with himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavily influenced by Charles Bukowski's "The Genius of the Crowd" as well as some classic horror. And T.S. Eliot, of course.

Kieren finds the old arsenal under a boulder by the crag—a hatchet, a switchblade, drugstore razors, a pair of shears, box cutters, bent nails. Broken glass. Drill bits. Simon is the first to suggest The Plan. When Kieren dumps the jagged hoard of knives and clippers at Simon's feet, memorabilia from his first life, he kneels down and inspects the dried gore on the edge of some thick wiring and says, "We have to get rid of these."

There's a boarded up house hunched discreetly among the rugged lowlands outside Roarton's forest. It used to be a shelter before they started taking rabids out there to shoot them point-blank during The Rising. Kieren throws the first blunt kitchen utensil and misses entirely. Simon throws the second, a giant bread knife that spins and lands with a thud in the rotting wood.

Kieren’s already grinning as he throws a bottle that shatters the attic window, Simon nudges his shoulder jovially and smashes the lower one with a giant kitchen blade. The old walls buckle under the weight of a utility grade multi-tool that snaps like a neck. It feels like revenge, for a million things all at once. For two-sided bloodshed, for the stifling memories, and for the slashes on both his wrists.

That’s when Simon asks him to tell him about Rick.

 

* * *

 

Leaning over the washroom sink, Kieren's hands are pinned by his arms to keep them from trembling, but he swears he can feel the reverberation in his wrists sending goosebumps up to his shoulders. In this light, he can see the veins in his face meandering like coastlines on a map. Like he's transparent now, decellularised, and if you looked hard enough you could see every organ system in partitions slithering under his surface like great land masses at sea.

He's lifted the cloth from his reflection, and he's hoping for something like a baptism. He's all new inside, all shiny and clean, and maybe if he forgives himself, the rest will follow.

Look in the mirror, he tells himself. Say it, admit to everything: "I don’t have a pulse." Don't make it sentimental. Throw out all that affirmation bullshit. Say it to your face: “I’m a mass of tubes, I am semisolids squeezed through busted plumbing, I am various viscera detained in shallow prisons.” Repeat it. Say it like you mean it. "I've been cleaved apart and stitched together like Frankenstein's monster; heavy thrumming in my abdomen, chasm in my ribcage, shrivelled lung in my left shoulder, innards bunched all the way to my knees, yeasty marrow in my arteries. A new exoskeleton.”

Don't look away. Say it once more, with feeling. _This substance, this sack of biomolecules, is dead weight._ Say it ten times. _I am insects, pinned on a fleshy corkboard. Blister beetles and Jerusalem crickets and hissing cockroaches. Rancid blood sloshing through my head. Chest a nest of bees, heart a hibernating colony, smoldered and smoked quiet. So chemical fried and torched you can only barely hear them drone on._

In films, vampires have no reflections. Because mirrors cast the image of the body andthe soul, that kind of thing, and vampires aren’t supposed to have a soul. That’s not what this is. This is the wrong kind of monster for that. This is Caliban seeing his own face in a glass; half-human, dysmorphic, crooked and warped.

He makes it a full minute before he has to look away. Baby steps.

 

* * *

 

The ugly truth is, he never dreams of killing Bill Macy, although he wishes he did. He dreams of killing Rick. In that dream, Rick lays back as he kicks his face in. Somehow, this leaves cuts all over Kieren’s hands. Like Bill the moment before he died, arms out and fingers spread, palms up, like an almighty Jehovah descending from the clouds, like a byzantine idol on a cross asking for forgiveness while the evidence of his crime drips onto the carpet. Rick barely weeps. He loves and hates Kieren as much as Kieren loves and hates him, and that makes it easy for both of them.

Alexander the Great cried and fell to his knees while burning down the city of Persepolis, but that never stopped him from lighting the matches. It never stopped his armies from destroying this massive, beautiful imperium.

Kieren counts his casualties. _If you’ve got hatred in a dream, does that count?_ What about love? If you get to see your loved ones again, if you’re happy—does it count?

 

* * *

 

The day after the funeral, Simon and Kieren go back to Amy’s grave with handfuls of wildflowers, trying to remember the floral, cloyingly sweet way funerals smelled before they started happening every week.

Simon knows the names of all the flowers and even the weeds: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch, cinquefoil, thistle. The brambles that get stuck in their soles, thorns splintered like arrows. The bouquets they collect look withered, like they’d last for unearthly changes of seasons. Could be a poignant symbol, or at least a wild, overgrown peculiarity Amy would have appreciated. 

But when they arrive, she’s been dug up. There’s a hollow chest in the ground where her casket was before, with the earth still fresh like the carpet to a new home. Now it’s just a crater where Tory boys smoke menthols during the church services. Must’ve been Maxine Martin’s people, mad bunch of cutthroats and conspiracy theorists. At least, that’s what Kieren imagines. Out loud, to himself, to Simon.

Philip still thinks she’s coming back and interrogates the parish council on where her body’s gone, if it’s only gone to the treatment centre and she might come back. Nobody comes back from the treatment centre, dead or alive.

Still, he writes letters and puts up signs and visits the cemetery every day. There are rows of various memorabilia, bouquets lined up along the edge of the hole. He’s become the maternal lunatic whose child is just a face on the back of a milk carton. No one has the heart to tell him: Things just happen in Roarton, and only the aberrant, dangerous, and heretical question the little crimes, unsolved murder mysteries. Traffic cones and pencil pushers and a lot of empty files. That’s the chain of command. You know too much or you know nothing.

 

* * *

 

Even while he and Kieren are good mates, Rick is always surrounded by these bruiser types. Yellowed-toothed boys grinning like cheshire cats, with bats, brass knuckles, and wrenches. They’re like secondary-school-level cannibals carving bones into cutlery. Through the halls, they smile when they peel their faces, chuckle while they guzzle from their throats. Cackle like witches while pureeing the insides of the new butt of their jokes. They stalk the corridors bragging about the tooth necklaces they’re going to string up as soon as somebody stands their ground.

Kieren tells Simon all of this, spills out his guts while brusquely throwing weapons at the old hovel. After each pause, he throws another.

It’s hard remembering the good times, when they weren’t glancing over their shoulders. There are rifts in between, scissions closing in on each other as they grow together, and then apart. They’re broke and then there’s change in their pockets. They’re tied together, cheek by jowl. They’re a means to each other’s ends.

Kieren wears Rick’s jacket. Kieren burns the shoes he leaves at his house (the soles smell like charred rubber and get in his eyes). Every meeting is all they look forward to. Every meeting is a hostile manoeuvre. Codependency becomes mutually assured destruction.

Kieren’s looking up the barrel of his gun, laying bare to him everything he was ashamed of. He takes out a contact lens, like the woman who died in the street the first night, hoping to God history doesn’t repeat itself. Hoping to God he won’t pull the trigger.

One night, sitting in that hummer his dad drives with his feet on the dash, Rick describes their process, the young offenders and how they run things. How they pick their targets, juveniles who’ve already got red on their ledgers and fake IDs.

Like purist kingpins of the suburban turf, they search out the kids who walk a certain way, who they despise for some haircut or uneven gait. A hamartia, a fatal flaw. They find reasons. If they can’t, they accuse them of picking fights or stealing the dart guns locked securely in their lockers. They all know it in their gut. Like carnivorous wolves that prey on the weak animals in the herd, they loathe most those least apt to survival.

They call it a "culling," for God's sake. All they're doing is cutting back on the surplus.

Rick’s got these heavy Gore-Tex boots, the kind they probably issue to armed force cadets, and they’re covered in mud from when the hummer breaks down and they have to push it, laughing, through a ditch. He’s got a look in his face, like he’s unlatched himself. Like he was once a cathedral of deadbolts, he’d rather burn himself down than change the locks, and now he’s letting beggars sleep inside his walls. Maybe he’ll always be this open. (He never is.)

 

* * *

 

 

Going outside without cover-up on involves Kieren pulling on his flesh like a heavy jacket. Heaving on an exterior, stretching it tight over his shoulders, masking his face with a disguise. Iron shackles around his ankles, making track lines to the sea.

They stop somewhere in the middle of the graveyard. Rows of tombstones like a pleonasm, fustian brag of the bones that kleptocrats have managed to hoard, stand like soldiers at the ready. Prickles from the hawthorns they picked are stuck in their palms, but their skin’s too numb to feel it either way. Neither of them have a pulse, but he swears, the cold blood humming in their brains could be heard from the street just working up the nerve to make eye contact.

Somewhere in between his hands in his pockets and Simon’s hands on either side of his neck, pushing circles into his collarbone, his insides shout _ashes to ashes, dust to dust_ and their foreheads are touching and their stilted frames vertical as the pious worship of the white crucifixes around them. The surface of his skin is room-temperature and static, his back as straight as the rope from a gallows with a scaffold and a trap-door. _The hangman’s elm is always the oldest of the city._

 

* * *

 

They corner them in parking lots, these minors and petty grifters driving black vans. By the time kids were pushing each other off of swing sets into the grit, they were already bored. In the crowd Rick’s fallen into, they make a pact just before each of their raids—even after a fresh kill is knocked to the asphalt, they don’t stop kicking.

They wait until nightfall to begin the manhunt—a rite of passage or a votive offering to the god of snapped braces and mace. Whoever they have set upon, they track them while they’re walking through poorly lit streets on the way home, when they’ll be helpless. They are huddled in the back when they slide open the doors with a squeal, three or four of them. Jeering gargoyles carrying knives between their teeth.

They’re bored. Dismal teenagers with bent spines are spitting blood into their sinks, and it’s not enough to appease their palates. They’ve got the butt-end of halfhearted warfare, they live and breathe nuclear armament like others do the raw country air. How mundane, clobbering people half to death becomes. They’re yawning.

 

* * *

 

 

How many euphemisms do they have for death? Hundreds, likely— _Dearly departed, gave up the ghost, in the boneyard—_ Like they want to cushion the blows; ugly things like death are embarrassing. _They’re crow bait, they’ve been put out of their misery, they’re wearing cement shoes, six feet under._

Simon’s mouth envelopes his, and it’s memory by association that makes it feel warm. It must be. _Another check off the mortician’s scorecard. Passed the sell-by date._ The overwhelming giddiness of intimacy. There’s a two second interim between the action and the reaction, the (lack of) pulse and the impulse, so there’s this lag time before the spasms in your gut kick in. _Tending toward a state of chemical equilibrium._ Simon tangles his hands in his hair, pause, and then— _boom, crash_ —he feels it in his tightly-wound chest. _In Abraham’s bosom. Paid Charon’s fare._

"Ya'aburnee," Simon murmurs. _Fenced in hollow ground. Arms too short to box with God. Passed over Jordan._

"Hm?"

"It's Arabic. Means, word for word, 'you bury me.' As in, I can't live without you, so I'd rather die first. You know, I'd rather you close my casket door than continue while you're in the ground. You bury me, first and foremost.”

"You don't know Arabic."

"No, but I know what the word means."

 

* * *

 

 

“Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him.”

Simon has found a discarded copy of _Dracula,_ one of many stacked outside a local bookstore. Said they were tossing anything that might seem in poor taste with the classical horror genre of undead already among the living. Seeing as it’s one of Simon’s favourites and it’s one of the only books he’s got (he left all his in case in his old bedroom), he starts reading it aloud while Kieren draws whenever they’re together. Better than listening to the radio, these days.

A week later, they’ve gotten half-way through. He’s cross-legged on the floor while Kieren sketches a portrait. “Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and Old Parr one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day?” His eyes dart across the page.

 

* * *

 

Kieren’s got his hands deep in his pockets, walking to Rick’s house after an argument with his parents, something to do with Jem. One of them is coming from the front, just a contour with a murky face and a hoodie. He walks fast toward him. When they pass, he hits his shoulder hard and before he can process what’s going on he’s elbowed him from behind and he’s falling face-first into the pavement.

He’s picking Kieren up by the back of his shirt, taking a fist full of hair and pushing him against a tall stone gate, his knuckles digging into the slabs while Kieren hangs there, grimacing in pain as his nails dig like arrowheads into his scalp.

He feels the glare of headlights soak over him like creosote and he thinks, _maybe someone is here to save me._ But the lights only pause and then move on with the rev of an engine, down the street and away from the scene of the crime. That’s when they start hitting him. Again and again and again, like bludgeons on fire. They knock him to the ground. He coils in pain, lurches with every kick and recoil. He starts moaning, and they decide it’s enough.

 

* * *

 

It’s a full week later, after neighbours have stopped coming by to check on Kieren’s family, stopped bringing overcooked casseroles (why always casseroles?), and the funeral decorations have been stuffed in boxes when Simon finally tells him he was meant to kill him.

“I had the dagger with me, and I told myself that I was ready. But when it came down to the line it just sort of… fell… out of my hand and into the dirt.” He’s got his hands folded in his lap, unable to make eye contact. Leaning forward and shuffling his feet like that, like a repentant child in the back of a police car, it’s hard to see him wearing bad intentions.

Thing is, Kieren had already worked through it for himself. Zoe wrote something crude across the bungalow windows. Called him a Judas _._ And Simon was at the graveyard at the moment he was, with a weapon. The undead prophet spelled it out in a video on the site (Kieren checked it after Amy died, trying to piece things together).

The undead prophet, with his discount halloween mask and badly voice-filtered snarl. Giving a lecture. “We are in rats' alley, where the dead men lost their bones. Do you see yourself as alive, or dead?” Kieren still checks the site, despite himself. He doesn’t swallow his shit, but he’s curious.

He’s bewildered at the fact that Simon once devoted himself to a fanatic with a mask. He _is_ compelling, the way a Janus-faced commander can pit his men-at-arms against any city with an enemy crown.

The most scared Kieren has been since he rose was when he was inches away from eating Jem’s brains, that day at the graveyard. The worst part was that he knew Jem wouldn’t be able to shoot, she couldn't before, and that made a part of him brave.

“The hand of the Lord is raised over a hollow of dry ossein, and he promises to bring the skeletons back to life. He lashes them with sinews and swathes them in skin. The bones come together, but they don’t breathe. This whole army, and Christ’s got to breathe into them first.” The prophet summons violence from nothing. From scripture, from peace and quiet. “ _I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”_

Simon saved him, the day of the failed second rising. More importantly, Kieren didn’t hurt anyone. The dagger, that would have been fine as well. He couldn’t hurt anyone if he was all-dead.

 _“_ All we’re missing is a last little gulp of air.”

Kieren is tired of missing things. He shuts off the computer after that.

Simon hasn’t turned up his head. “I know,” Kieren finally says, and exhales (or, rather, pretends to exhale) slowly.

“Christ.” Simon runs his fingers through his hair. Like he wants to say ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words don’t really cut it. Kieren found the plastic bags under his bed, a half-hearted cradle after getting clean. The blue oblivion. The cards from his father stuffed in a breadbox, stifled birthday wishes and some left blank. He won’t ask him about them. In some sad way, he understands everything. “I know,” Kieren says again.

He sits down next to him and leans over until their faces are level. Might as well dump it out on the table, fast, like ripping off a band-aid. “I think I’m starting to feel things.”

Simon pauses and looks at him. “What do you mean? Like, tactile senses? Temperature and everything?”

“At first, it was heat underneath my skin. I’m starting to remember the way capillaries feel, when they flush out your face, and this coppery taste. Sometimes I can feel edges to things, unfocused, like in a thermograph. It’s only getting stronger.”

Simon is curiously nonplussed, as if Kieren’s eternally been this seraphic oracle in his eyes, as if hearing he’s begun to resuscitate himself from beyond the grave is redundant. He turns to face him, takes his face in his hands, and kisses his forehead. It feels chaste but leisurely, drawn out. “Did you feel that?”

Kieren mumbles, nettled, “Come on, Si. Quit it,” but he can barely restrain the wide grin nicking away at the crooks of his mouth.

Simon moves down to the space between his eyes. “How about that?”

Kieren closes his eyes. Jokingly, “You know… I think I’m starting to feel something.” Next is the bridge of his nose, which really does seem to hum as little thrills and prickles quiver through his face.

Simon kisses his lips. Kieren says, against his mouth, “I felt that one. Keep trying, we’re getting there.” Simon kisses his chin as he leans back his head. He kisses the arch of his jaw, the anterior triangle over his neck. Down to his thyroid, lips lingering over his aorta like he could kill him if he wanted, though they know that’s just pretend. Playing at kissing just like real people. Putting a full set of dental records on his neck (that’s the wrong kind of monster for that, again). They’re trying, they’re trying so hard they can believe for moment. Kieren feels everything.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, in the dream where he kills Rick, he’s rabid, and he’s colossal. Sticky with blood, splintering bones between his gums, and he realises these snapping toothpicks are pieces of a city, one he is trampling through. He’s a troglodyte, neanderthal, barbarously hungry and too stunned to stop staggering along like a prehistoric mammal with hooves and claws.

He understands, now, why in ancient lore the divine is not static or humane, and why they’ve never played nice. They’re brutes, self-serving in gorgeously twilled pogroms, mass-liquidation. Maybe they don’t want to be, or maybe they’re horrified by it, but they are ruthless.

 

* * *

 

 

Simon turns the next page of _Dracula._ “Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others?”

“Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?”

“Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins, how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them and then, and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”

 

* * *

 

That night, years before he died. It feels like hours before Kieren can stand up. His knees are shaking and every bone in his body is screaming and corkscrewing around to dig into his skin.

He staggers to Rick’s house, feels like he’s crawling with all ten fingers shovelling dirt and excavating neighbour’s backyards. Three taps on his window, then he waits for the back door to open. He says, before Rick can see, “They took me off guard. It’s not so bad as it looks.”

Rick swings the door on its hinges and stops dead. “I’m going to kill them.” He looks Kieren up and down with naked, sore eyes full of a strange, primordial hurt. “What did they look like?”

“I don’t know. Brown hair. Three rings on each hand, I remember that.” He reaches up to feel the gash on his nose.

“I’ll get the kit,” he murmurs. But he doesn’t. He looks dumbly at Kieren, feeling out his own wounds.

He puts his hand on Kieren’s, curls around it, and pulls it down away from his face. With his other hand, he very gently runs his finger over the still-forming bruise on his cheek. When he reaches his mouth, which has just a daub of blood running down from a split lip or a broken tooth, Kieren winces in pain and closes his eyes.

He feels Rick’s lips, still gently, like he might hurt him more, breathing against Kieren’s mouth, and his forehead touching his. He doesn’t open his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” It could mean a hundred different things.

Kieren echoes him. He doesn’t know why. “I’m sorry.” _I’m sorry for me, I’m sorry for this. Making things dangerous. I’m sorry for the red iron melting around my jaws._ Rick is kissing him, somehow apologetically. Like serving penance for something.

After this, Kieren runs home. His legs howl in pain, but he runs all the way to his bedroom.

By the time Kieren’s lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, trying to sleep or sob or cry out despite the pain, covering his face with a pillow, covering his face with hoods to hide the swelling, these kids who kick him to the ground are bored.

Simon is reading to him. Something he copied down on the back cover of his own bible, the one he owned before the rising. Poetry, always him and poetry. _And the best at murder are those who preach against it. Beware the preachers._

_They are afraid of what they do not know._

Kieren smiles at his hands as draws on the kitchen floor. Simon is leaning against the counter.

_Beware those who seek constant crowds, for they are nothing alone._

_There is genius in their hatred. There is enough genius in their hatred to kill you._

By the time houses are burning and the new species of living dead getting gunned down in the streets, they’re bored out of their minds.

A week later, Rick turns up outside Kier’s door with raw eyes and a repentant expression, a thief returning stolen silver at the foot of a vicar. He’s clutching his shoulder as Kieren lets him hurriedly in and leads him to the edge of his bed. He fumbles for antiseptic dressings and pulls down his collar to get at his shoulder. There are a couple of mild cuts made through the fabric of his shirt. “You’re fine,” He promises, dabbing at them with a wet towel he gets from the bathroom.

“He’s never hit me before.” There’s an unspoken testimony, this was Bill. People say that, in movies. _He’s never done that, never this bad._ Like they’re apologising for the grazes, rough patches of skin that left shades of maroon in the shape of fists. Well, this time, it’s almost certainly a lie. How he broke skin this time, Kieren doesn’t ask.

“Shit. I think he scraped my gums.” His teeth are turning pink. There’s a gouge over his chin, as well. Standing above him, Kieren puts his hand under the apex of his lower jaw and runs his thumb over the slash, streaking Rick’s face with the open wound.

Kieren leans down and kisses him. His blood doesn’t taste sweet, but it isn’t entirely bitter, like something that has been frothing warm inside for so long it’s begun to rust.

 

Simon turns another page. “Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”

“Oh, it was the grim irony of it all, this so lovely lady garlanded with flowers, that looked so fair as life, till one by one we wondered if she were truly dead, she laid in that so fine marble house in that lonely churchyard, where rest so many of her kin, laid there with the mother who loved her, and whom she loved, and that sacred bell going ‘Toll! Toll! Toll!’ so sad and slow, and those holy men, with the white garments of the angel, pretending to read books, and yet all the time their eyes never on the page, and all of us with the bowed head.”

 

Isn’t that what makes a tragedy so heartbreaking? From the beginning, there’s this epitaph. So everyone knows how it will end. Begin from the ending, start room temperature in a ditch with maggots in your stomach and know that in the end you’ll be sitting in therapy for an hour without saying a single word. Begin with a black waltz while fair Paris is burning, end with a handshake and a whisper, that this won’t end well. Fatalism, predeterminism, reverse mortality. Achilles is powerless, gets an arrow in his heel. Stars and all of that shit.

In his mind, this is how it begins. There’s Rick, with a knife in his skull and inky plasma blackening the edges of his mouth. Kieren thinking, _I wish I could suck your last words from the back of your throat._ There’s Kieren with Rick’s blood in his mouth. _I’ll suck your bruises out of you._ There’s Rick, with Kieren’s blood in his mouth. That’s the coda. _I’d suck the venom from your open mouth._ In the end, it was only Kieren’s blood, and he thanks God for that. The epilogue is two children holding hands, faultless before the wine drips to the napkin.

It becomes hard to breathe. He starts telling people in the pharmacy he’s got asthma, blames a pre-existing condition for biting back gulps of air. He goes to a nurse after something like a panic attack and she tells him he might have a heart condition, gives him a pamphlet for a cardiologist. He uses his inhaler and starts picking his nails until they bleed.

_We breathe into beige paper bags. Anything to mollify the confusion. Anything to simplify_ _the math._

Kieren loved him so fucking much. But it was like playing chess with an amnesiac. The next day he denies all, barely talks to Kieren, even stiffens when their shoulders touch. Pretending to mess around, he pushes him and he slams against the wall, and his other mates snigger.

Sandbanks and finitude. Death lurks from the beginning. The Danse Macabre before the plague even begins, painting crosses on doors in sheep’s blood. It’s understood, during tragedies, that one’s downfall consumes from the inside before turning inside out. Kieren’s head hits the plaster and he already knows it will happen again.

 

Children have more nightmares than most adults. Children are afraid of the dark because they don’t have enough to work with.

These children learn that the bogeys and hellions of their youth don’t hide in closets, or under the beds. They take the pieces of themselves that they are terrified of—vanities, desires, transgressions, misdeeds—and discover that their closet monster is in their room, sitting on their bed, wearing their clothes, kissing their mothers on the cheeks in the morning.

You cut yourself apart and put yourself together again. Give yourself the steady hands of a hearse driver. Make one a pocketknife—a collection of pliers, bottle openers, serrated blades. Make the other a steel gauntlet. Your lungs want to run away from you and your heart wants to squeeze you tight in its fist. Beat them until they behave, stick your fingers into an electrical socket, and zap yourself awake.

Kieren decides that was born sick. Born with this chronic disease, this terminal illness. This lack of blood beneath the surface. He skin a blanket never able to keep him warm enough. His parents always said, _you’ll catch a cold if you don’t keep warm_.

You take the pieces of yourself that you are terrified of, and you pretend they’re across the room. This is you, but the parts are sleazy and foul. You fight them to the death every night, winner-takes-all. You are always the winner, but you’ll never know which one.

 

* * *

 

Over the weekend, Kieren and Simon pack a few of Kieren’s things into cardboard boxes. They plan to move them to Simon’s, so any time Kieren wants to spend the night (the vague suggestion his parents nod to and do not question), he can. He doesn’t need much. PDS need surprisingly few of the essential products the living use without thought. Simon gets around to picking them up while Kieren sticks around the bungalow.

He’s huddled in his favourite nook of the room, where Simon once propagated and sermonised to his circle of dead-eyed acolytes. He saw Gary’s pickup truck outside the house earlier, and he doesn’t want to face him, still clinging to his and Jem’s relationship or trying to make up. In the end, every one of Jem’s exes end up staggering outside, checking their vitals, nursing a new sprain. He’ll just have to wait it out.

Kieren's distracting himself by digging his fingernail into the skin on his arm, leaving a trail of crescents in a line from his wrist to elbow. He really is trying to feel, to jolt himself with just the right electric spark to contract his muscles. Like CPR. To get him to cough up whatever's lodged in his throat so he can give respiration another go.

It takes a few scant minutes before Kieren starts shaking, all over. He can’t control his limbs. This time, he panics, but he's stuck in place, his vision dimming.

It feels like his skin is moving, relocating, sliding from place to place. And underneath is both burning and bone-chillingly cold. Like frost bite, like a rubber band’s wound around his fingers.

There was a kid in his primary school with temporal lobe epilepsy. He had a seizure in class one day, convulsed a bit and laid down on the floor. It wasn’t what Kieren expected. There wasn’t much shaking, a lot of talking, mouthing the same word over and over again, his head in someone’s lap. The school nurse is there, asking how many fingers she’s holding up, but he isn’t answering, not with numbers. He bites his tongue so hard the skin comes off.

He's weak and it’s all spinning out of his control, grinding halts and thrusts ahead, leaving him staggering on his own. It’s as if someone’s pinned his arms back and is draining him with a straw.

This is how it happens; he loses control of his body—to a virus, to blue oblivion, whatever—and he’d rather be doing anything, if it were only his choice.

It's all too familiar, when he squints and his vision blurs he can still see it all against his eyelids. A huge banquet laid out, his head on a platter. A stack of blank graves next to a box of permanent markers. So many dinners with his hands curled into fists against his thighs. He lurches on the ground, his head knocks into a leg of the couch.

The universe is playing Russian roulette, and he takes the gun from its hands and points it at himself, laughing, because futility's fucked with his head, prodded and jabbed and soaked it in gasoline and he’s punch-drunk and saying, _I’ll pull the trigger. I’ll do it. I’ll fucking do it._ He’s waiting for the universe to stop him, but the universe is a cinder block wall and a can of pickaxes, and it won’t block your path and it won’t stop you bashing your head against the firebricks, and it sure as hell won’t make you a tunnel. He drops the gun and hears it echo.

He can’t tell, but he might be frothing at the mouth.

Now he's lying facing the cave, his arms out like a martyr, like Christ with a bleeding heart and stigmata on both hands, and he's leaking onto the brambled ground and pooling in rocks. It was supposed to be sharp and quick, a blade dipped in alcohol. Now he's sure, hell is a sub-zero environment, where the walls are made of mirrors and your eyes are taped open.

When he died, his life was supposed to flash before his eyes like a motion picture at high speed. But, no, someone’s hit the slow-mo button and he's shackled to the theatre chair, forced to listen to disparaging commentary on what he did wrong after every scene. It stops, rewinds, replays. There are no red curtains, it’s not a smash hit or a box-office success. The theatre is empty. It’s a low budget black comedy with scenes spliced together the way an oil spill meshes petroleum and animal kidneys, tangling in the projector. It ends with a dismal rattle and the lights sputter out.

When he can finally move, his legs jarred, he pulls himself up with all his strength and balances himself on the balls of his feet. He runs, stiff and jagged with his legs buckling under him, out the back door. There's a shovel leaning against the wall.

The universe is playing Russian roulette and he takes the gun from its hands and empties every chamber into its face. He picks up the shovel by the end of its handle and it's shaking so violently he drops it with a metallic clang. He picks it up again.

His parents never taught him how to say “no,” so he learned how to say it the hard way. Confused and scared, and half under his breath. He takes a swing at the window and makes a small dent in the centre.

He was told, a reassuring afterthought from his mother, that there would be a heaven but all he remembers is his warped reflection in his pocketknife. He uses the blunt back of the shovel to put a full crater in the glass, crushed fragments silting down onto the window pane.

Rick never said, "I love you," and he's afraid that if Simon does he'll break down completely. A large piece of the window pane falls and explodes on the ground.

Kieren crumples against the wall and feels too fed up to move a muscle. His glass ruin lays around him, brittle shavings pressing into his skin without drawing blood. A toppled vase a delinquent boy hides from his mother, because there are too many pieces to glue back together again, too much glue, too much for it be the same again.

Which is he: the shovel, or the window?

When Simon gets back, Kieren can hear the boxes drop with a clatter to the ground as Simon bolts around the house and finds him there, arms limp and head supported by the cheaply painted panels like he’s got a brain injury, his eyes rolled back. Simon panics immediately and shakes Kieren by the shoulders, but he’s fine, he’s blabbering and offering to find a way to replace the damage.

He silences him with a look and asks, “What happened?” He eases up and pulls his feet under him to sit by Kieren. Kieren’s hands are tucked under his legs in an effort to hide them. They’re still shaking.

“I smashed your window.” Kieren smiles. It’s a bit eerie. He’s covered in shards of the stuff, splinters in his elbows and slabs of it lodged in his skin. Simon pulls a few shreds from his hair.

“Okay,” Simon sighs, suddenly gentle and smoothing his hands over Kieren’s hair, around his face. “That’s fine.” He turns. In some sad way, he understands. They’re shoulder-to-shoulder by the back steps, overlooking the lots of half-way shacks and mobile homes of the caravan park. He slouches a bit, like he plans to take an evening nap.

_Dear God of unarmed robberies, dear Moloch of carnage and mescaline and briny sea smoke never to be in my lungs again, dear Allah of infatuated atheists laughing and feeding dismembered pieces of each other to wood chippers. Let’s lay side by side in the chalked lines of police like the double homicide we are._

He’d always said to himself: this is why the modern Prometheus is doomed. He’s made of too many pieces. It’s nothing to do with playing God, he’s been slit and stripped into so many cords he’s lost in his humanity.

But there’s Simon next to him, who’s been pulled together with surgical thread and plastered-on bone grafts so many times he’s more remedial equipment than sentient, and he’s beautiful.

His grandmother died when he was young. Plastic tubes had kept her alive at the end, hooking her nose and arms to machines. Every breath came out as a wheeze, as if there was a pillow over her face. “Keep watching the green blip,” she’d said. “That is my heart.”

Simon takes his wrist in his hands. He’s delicate, a bull in a china shop that’s learnt to keep close to the ground without flattening the Ming vases, alabaster figurines, and bone ash ceramics it is in his nature to trample. He moves his thumb over tacked-up incision slowly, with medicinal care. He doesn’t heal the scars. The scars will never heal. This is a fact that Kieren is okay with.

 

* * *

 

Every night for a stretch of days, he stops knocking on Rick’s door; no more of the medicinal smell of scullcap, dodging of leery greetings from Bill, usual nightly escapades to the cove. The Safe Place. Tells him they’d best leave each other alone, forget everything. He tries to quit him, to wash his hands of him, even though he loves him to death. Right up to death and over the brink. All he can see is Rick, palms clapped over his ears, howling, “I can’t believe you if I can’t hear you. I can’t exist if I can’t see you.” Rick, kicking up dirt. Rick, eyes on his shoes, cracking jokes on the brink of breaking down.

Rick is leaning into his locker and blinking fast. He slams it with a swelling rage he seems to conjure up from somewhere blistering and searing and hidden, like it’s a punching bag taking a hit from a boxing champion with a dead cat. He strikes the wall with his bare fist, muttering under his breath and then clutching it to his abdomen. Tries to rub off as the hard-hitting combatant he was always intended to be, but something’s hit a nerve. A surrounding crowd of students goes quiet at the outburst and then hums with rushed conversation. He glances at Kieren, looks down at his shoes, and walks away, head bowed.

Neighbours claim to see him smashing bottles with wrenches near the bottom of the crag. He doesn’t speak to his usual pack of so-called mates, he lashes out at every tap on the shoulder. One night, he calls Kieren and hangs up immediately afterwards, leaving Kieren to listen to the dead air.

Ren considers talking to him anyway, admitting to things he’ll never hear. “I love you, I really do love you.” A one-sided conversation with no repercussions. “It’s just that I don’t think you could love me as much as I do, or not like that, and it’s better to cut our losses.” 

The next night Rick calls and he’s stuttering, apologising, threatening something like a suicide. _I need you, and I hate this. But I’ll still swill down this whole bottle of Oxycodone, easy._

Twenty minutes later and Kieren’s tapping at his window again. Reject, regret, recover, repeat. The cycle continues. Pretend they’re okay, pretend they’re not holding ultimatums to each other’s throats, pretend they’re not in love, pretend they’re not taking fist-fulls of each other’s shirts as Rick pulls his neck close and pushes his lips to where his jawbone hinges to his jugular.

Pretend Rick’s unending chain of short-lived girlfriends ( _“to keep my dad off my back”_ ) doesn’t feel more like a chokehold, yet it never stops them from laughing breathlessly, pressing their foreheads together behind half-closed doors while his father is in the other room.

Rick is saying, lying on his back in the shingled mouth of their Cavern of Confidential Ventures, “I’m sorry, I never meant it. I do these things, and I’m scared, I really am. God, Ren, I think all these conquerers and gunmen, people in the Good Books,” he cringes at his father’s old maxim, pulled from his own lips, “They must be terrified all the time. I push some poor kid in the locker room and he lands on his face, and he makes this sound like a garbage disposal… a sadistic joke, like he’s got a dying bird stuffed up his throat.”

Neither of them are laughing. Rick doesn’t blink. “The whole time I hear people laughing at him, and jeering and slapping me on the back like I’ve won something… and I smile and laugh along. It’s because I’m terrified.”

_There is genius in their hatred. There is hatred. There is enough hatred._

_And then they will hate you. And their hatred will be perfect._

_Enough hatred to kill you._

The world is made out of cancer, house fires, and Brain Death. Kieren used to think everyone was made of bread, water, clay in gentle hands. They're not—they’re still beautiful, killing each other in the streets and alleyways, locking them underneath the floorboards. But that's okay, it's okay.

_They say, the Greeks and Freud and everyone else, that the counterpart to love is death. Well, obviously, that theory’s full of holes. Just like us._

Simon shows him his pocket bible. It’s got pages ripped out, bloodstains. It’s missing the cover and half of genesis, the beginning of the world ripped out. He threw it away twice; two dumpsters, two cities. Salvaged it both times. Kieren runs his hands over the loosening pages.

 

* * *

 

 

The way the story of Hades and Persephone really goes, the god of the underworld was alone in the festering, cranial underbelly of eternal damnation for millennia. Before he meets her, grovelling in the broken jaw of his lost kingdom, his skin has begun to crawl over his back with a mind of its own. Hades is a shade, more sinister even than grave, dark-robed Demeter. Mortals avert their gaze as they give offerings, his name unsafe to pronounce. In his subterranean domain, he still is judge, jury, and executioner, but he is unloved.

In the depths of Tartarus, you can’t hear the fire and brimstone tormenting lost souls like cattle in an abattoir. All you hear is a gavel.

Hades builds a replica of earth. He starts with dark and light, the vault of the firmament, a dome engraved with stars, like in the six days of creation. A full-scale model with everything—the Red Sea, the Alps, Death Valley—down to the last pinnacle and gorge. It has to be exact, because Persephone has to believe it. She has to believe that his hell is a safe haven.

 

* * *

 

“A band of civilians has been countering the rabid attacks with massive shootouts of PDS, targeting those not wearing the cosmetics required to make them appear living,” A slim woman in a grey jacket says to the camera.

Another reporter shuffles his papers and pivots his gaze forward. “Parliament has been asked to revoke the right of the half-dead to be publicly ‘exposed.’”

“The world continues to lack total security.” A grey-haired man looks stern and solemn while demonstrators and religious extremists holding signs that say, “The end is nigh” parade in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. None of this feels new. The end _was_ nigh, it just went on longer than they expected.

Kieren lays curled up with his head resting in Simon’s lap. They probably spend too many hours watching these news stories on the small television set they’ve arranged on a pile of spare blankets in the bungalow sitting room. Men with ties and Invisalign braces use words like ‘attrition warfare’ and ‘poison pill dogma.’

Kieren starts to fall asleep to the city-wide disasters and blurry shots of rabid protesters under gunfire and jagged barbed wire around abandoned quarantine zones with their warning signs barely hanging to their nails. News programs wearing jade-coloured glasses. Like they’re in the middle of a Cold War, and if a nuclear holocaust started tomorrow there’s nothing they could do except hide under their desks. Simon traces up the base of Kieren’s neck, then runs his fingers through his hair. As if he could shield Kieren from all the targeted missiles in all the test sites in the world.

When he looks back to the screen, bold letters in white are flashing under a shot of The Shard being restored from its damage during the rising. “…NEW DISEASE TARGETS THE PARTIALLY-DECEASED. THE LIVING ARE ADVISED TO AVOID CONTACT. RESEARCH HAS FAILED TO SHOW WHETHER THE SERIOUS ILLNESS IS CONTAGIOUS.”

Kieren sits up groggily. Simon instantly grabs his right hand and holds on for dear life. Or so he imagines. Strange, how such sentimental habits of the living cling on. 

 _Breaking News_ headlines plaster the live film of a cartoonishly red-faced man with a taped-up sign—“BE NOT AFRAID”—preaching to passerby outside a hospital. The nurses smoking just outside the doors frown and gawk at him, while a family with two little girls gathers around. “The disease manifests itself first in the extremities furthest from the sufferers slowly-moving circulatory system,” someone says into a crackling mic, “In the fingertips and legs, moving toward the centre. The skin appears colourless, grey and then coal-like black.”

“Due to the increase of ‘PDS free’ hospitals in the central London area, this infection could prove to become a untreated epidemic.” The woman on camera’s hand twitches nervously. “Studies… are researching medication… but have found little success. Already, the terms Lady Lazarus and Enkidu’s Syndrome are surfacing in the medical community.”

Kier gets up and circles to the back of the couch anxiously. “This can’t be real, can it? They just want people to hate us more. It’s not real.”

The camera cuts to found footage of a PDS in a hospital gown being carried to a bed covered in linens. He’s already half-dead, but now he's both pale and emaciated, with a grey colour in his face that makes him look like charred stone. Doctors in antibacterial masks move around him.

The film stops and goes live to another girl writhing on a hospital floor, a black rot crawling up her arms and turning her veins onyx black as they intertwine and snake from her wrists and up her neck. Her mouth opens and closes noiselessly. A pool of mottled liquid streaks along the floor, clumps in her hair, and drips from her skeletal jaw.

She starts coughing and the camera moves backwards out of the room quickly, quivering in fear from the floor back to the ceiling. It's eerie, how empty the ward is. The doctors have fled like Roman medics from leper tents. There's one last shot of her from the doorway, in heaps on the floor with blood guzzling in her throat and dripping from her asphyxiated, pasty lips before it blinks out.

Kieren stares ahead with fear in the little black stars making craters in his eyes and his fingers bent in a death grip on the back of the couch. When he starts rocking back and forth Simon jumps up instinctually, grabs him from behind, and holds him around his chest, like a parent shielding a child from a grisly car wreck on the other end of a highway. The television has gone to a faltering white screen, like the kind his parents described just before the rising.

Simon is saying into his neck, "It's alright, you're safe, that will never happen to you, it could all be a hoax." A grey mass of assuring words.

The funny thing is, it is alright. Maybe, Kieren thinks, he is coming alive, or maybe he’s beginning the process of mouldering all over again. But Simon’s fine, he has to be fine. He was one of the first to react to the neurotriptyline, unlike Kieren, who was one of the last in the treatment centre. He was buried far from Roarton, and far from the city. The funny thing is, he believes every word Simon says.

Kieren is gripping Simon's arms tight when he seems to calm down, leaving eight little marks in his pallid skin. The light of the screen fills the dim room still, and for a moment there is total, airtight silence.

Then, the news clicks back on without explanation. Several nervous reporters look down, pause, and continue with an editorial on "ten ways to remodel your quarantine quarters for everyday use." Simon looks back at the screen with close-mouthed shock.

"They really don't care. They care even less than they pretend to," Kieren whispers with a resigned laugh.

_But there is genius in their hatred. There is enough genius in their hatred to kill you. To kill anybody._

"We're lucky. We're far away from the hot spot in the city. It won’t make its way here.” Simon pulls him back to the couch. "Besides, I'd kill anything before I let it touch you."

"You can't kill a disease.” Still, Kieren leans back into his lap and closes his eyes, listening to the posh Southern accent of the woman, murmuring rapidly about cement walls and fault lines and caved-in shelters, not seeming to process the hollow words as they're coming out her mouth.

Ten minutes later; that’s when Kieren starts to shake uncontrollably. His fingers are seizured as if by electrocution, dancing like a Franz Liszt on crystal meth, like a drowning spider. Simon sits up and looks at him with the focus of a high-precision jet plane, runs his hands down the side of his head as if they were bunker mates in an air raid, squadron comrades during an epidemic and Kier's starting on cold sweats and night terrors and Simon can only run cold rags over his forehead. He cradles his head again, not trying to ask him what’s wrong.

When Kieren’s nose starts to drip blood, he seems to stop trembling. He jumps up to get a cloth from the kitchen and keeps his back to the door as he looks down into the sink. Simon walks over and leans on the doorway.

“How long has that been happening?” He asks with an accusatory edge to his voice. He's trying not to panic, for Kieren's sake.

“It’s never been this bad before,” he lies. “Every time it happens, I feel things a little more. I thought… maybe… it’s bringing me back”

“That’s what you were on about the other day?” Kieren turns back to look at him. He feels small, and rattled up by an unseen aftershock. He doesn’t want to go in to Dr. Russo. Simon understands this, he knows.

“Listen, it’s no big deal. It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’ll probably just pass.” Simon nods, pauses pensively, and begins to prepare their doses of neurotriptyline.

 

* * *

 

In the usual lore, Hades decides to introduce the night gradually. Scurrying shadows darting at the edge of Persephone’s vision, semidarkness. Gives her twilight, then dusk, then sundown. Gives her the moon, and then takes away the moon. Gets rid of the stars. It would be too hard on her to go from one long day into utter darkness. In The New Hell, The Garden, Persephone’s Girlhood, the night is gentle.

In Persephone’s world, people pour salt on slugs just to watch them suffer, people clobber each other to pulpy bits in the crawling depths of the cold city's arms just to be touched, people cut the wires in their breaks just to cause collisions, and they say they want love. They say they want love more than anything else. There is love in the afterlife. There is love at night. There is warmth in hellfire. You get to burn all your belongings, you get to begin again. Hades' earth is the same, except there is love.

Hades forgot about Persephone's appetite. She was made to eat more than these ashen fruits and dust that falls apart in your hands. She misses the narcissus flowers and Cyprus plants. As the lights dim, she howls and feels the pulsing walls for a way out of her cage, the one Hades so lovingly furnished. He thought he was the red skein traced from the centre of the labyrinth, but he was the Minotaur—moaning and carnivorous inside hostile walls. The thread was her blood, and he thought he could escape.

Hades doesn’t tell her _you’re safe, I love you, nothing can hurt you_. That would be a lie. What he says is “You’re dead. Nothing can hurt you.”

 

 

* * *

 

Kieren was born scared. Scared of fucking up, scared of being noticed, scared of _dying._ This constant dread coiling in a helix up from the base of his spine, always stiffening him like a soul case in an open-casket funeral. Like he was practicing, sleeping on his back as a rehearsal for the centuries after.

Fear was getting stabbed until it hurt to not be stabbed. Making a habit of being alert until every shadow was a gorgon or a leviathan. You see a monster, and you don’t wait to look for the zipper up its back. Like Lovecraft in Brooklyn—afraid of his own shadow, buying switchblades from pawnshops—everything is unfamiliar, so everything could kill you and keep your brain in a mason jar.

 

* * *

 

 

That last night, a row of bottles lined up on the cave wall. Candles Rick set fire to with his lighter surrounding them in a midnight seance, or the inkling of some conventional dinner party where things go right when people kiss. But there’s nothing romantic about them this time, it looks more like The Day of The Dead.

He’s been talking about the army for weeks, about his dad shoving him toward basic training. Kier says something like, “You’d end up cinders. They’d send you in a duffel bag back home to your folks,” and they drop it. A bottle of White Lightning later, Rick has his tongue in his mouth. It’s so much easier to swallow this, when he’s wasted. It won’t matter tomorrow. He draws back only to say, like an infant kicking over a house of cards, “He knows, you know. My dad. He saw us the other day.”

They don’t talk much after that.

 

* * *

 

There’s another way to tell the story of Hades and Persephone. The right way, the way it is in the end.

Hades has been watching as she dances in the meadow with her maidens for annum after annum. He thinks, _how perfect. What a perfect, living creature to bring down to hell with me._ He knows, love for her is bigger than the usual, secular devotion.

“They’ll make cults for you,” he tells her through the ground as she as she gathers foliage and weaves it into laurels. “They’ll make you the patron saint of mice turned to lions. They’ll make reliquaries on mountain peaks.” She’ll learn to wade through the rivers of Acheron, Cocytus, Phelgethon. She’ll wear the Helm of Darkness.

When Hades thrusts one greying, decrepit hand from the soil of the meadow, spindly fingers curling and uncurling, by all rights Persephone should have cowered. The alyssum, boxwood, moneywort, oleander, flowers of the meadow wilt and shrivel, but she only gouges her fingers into the earth’s open wounds, trying to pry the secrets from the ground.

She crushes Hades’ pomegranate in her bare, clenched fist. She doesn’t flinch away. She goes willingly through the crust of the earth. 

As Persephone stands before the gates of hell, Cerberus and all the watchdogs and beasts lower their heads and bow at her feet. Sheol, Gehenna, Tophet, deep in the loathsome valleys where they burn children sacrifices to the gods, their screams masked by drums. The burning rubbish heaps south of Jerusalem. She becomes their queen.

It isn’t paradise and she hasn’t conquered death by any means. But she has learned to live with it. Even to fall in love, despite the Purgatorium’s blood libations and the thralls of the chthonic deities. Ancient curses and the abodes of rebels against the gods do not strike fear into her heart.

It is night. She sleeps.

 

* * *

 

Kieren is sixteen and he discovers the satisfaction of seeing his own blood when it feels like his brain is boiling with it. Rick must have found the slashes on his arms, mostly sloppy, while he was still learning to do it right, to find the perfect depth. At first it’s just the scissors, the steak knives in the kitchen drawers. Sharp tools start disappearing. Then it’s safety pins and forks. Palette knives from his bedroom, where he paints. Even the paper clips he hoards in his pockets. He suspects Jem, then his parents.

He’s undead and he can't hurt himself anymore, so he drinks until he's convulsing over a toilet bowl. Heaving up all this murky bile, clouding the water until it's the colour of charcoal, he feels a hand on his back. Jem's closed the door, quietly kneels next to him with a reassuring, determined expression on her face. He was hoping the retching would burn through his throat, but it doesn’t. He doesn’t feel a thing. He sees the look in Jem’s eyes, and he never tries it again.

He’s sixteen and Rick’s been gone for weeks, but he goes to the cave most evenings anyway. He’s sitting on a rock just outside with a sketchpad on his lap, when he hears an odd grinding from beneath him, the rock lurching with the shift of weight. He stands up and rolls it over.

Underneath the boulder is an antique shop’s worth of silverware, lock-blade knives. Sharp rocks. He takes a swiss army knife in his hands, and he recognises the one his father gave him.

Rick sneaking out with something sharp buried deep in his pockets, each time. Hoarding them like magpies, cutting his hand as he gripped Kieren’s makeshift shivs in his closed hands. To no avail, obviously. Kieren always kept the swiss army knife on him, or on a shelf in his closet. Rick tried so hard. Kieren fucked it up, then got back a lifelong grace period.

He grabs fistfuls of the filed objects he once ground into points as warm tears begin falling down his cheeks. He leaves all but the single knife in that secluded cleft, until after he dies and comes back to life.

Kieren throws the last screwdriver at the shack. His arms are aching, and he savours that feeling. He savours the feeling of being chilled to the bone, out in this shoreline pasture without a jacket. He even shivers a bit, when Simon touches his shoulder, and he grins so hard it hurts.

“Did you ever hate him for it?” Simon asks, as they huddle together on the way home, against the feeble light of the evening. He has the most genuine look drawing out his face, searching, searching, an archaeologist and Kieren’s a whole era of history. A cartographer and Kieren’s the map. _Even if I’ve got the new zombie cancer, even if it’s catching, even if I have to kiss you through a hazmat suit. I’m sticking this one out._

“Constantly. But not in the end.”

“I feel sorry for him.” He wraps an arm around Kieren. Rick was scared, like Kieren. They were always scared. They’re still daunted by the fact of their being sick, anaemic, lethal.

 _You will survive, this time. You will survive me, we will survive each other,_ Kieren says in his mind, to Simon. To himself. _Or vice versa. I want to die in the same room, knowing we outlived them all just to bite down on the same cyanide pill._

Neither Simon nor Kieren have worn cover-up in weeks. Kieren looks in the mirror until it gets boring, until he’s laughing at his own face and the way it looks when it’s twisted in a smile. They aren’t brave by any stretch of the imagination. They’re feeling their way through the dark, which is all they have. It’s enough.


	3. The Fire Sermon

Simon and Kieren meet at the curb around the corner from Kieren's house, which has become their routine. Simon’s noticed that Kieren spends less and less time around his folks, and they don't seem to mind. It must defuse the terse situation.

Ever since the first stories about The Syndrome cropped up, Kieren says, his parents have been inventing brand new ways of shaking off touchy subjects.

It’s suffocating, like they’re stuffing the insulation between their walls with everything they don’t want to look at any more, with all the brochures with the words ‘beware the modern pestilence’ and the padlocks on their neighbour’s fences. There are the familiar moth holes; the unspoken fear that becomes a rat in the walls, scratching in the ceilings and gnawing the upholstery. Give it a few days, there will be five long rips in the wallpaper and it will already be too late to call the exterminator.

It makes him want to scream from the garret to the bottom of the quiet, dripping cellar; _we might be dying, and it doesn’t matter to anyone because they think we’re already dead._

One night, Kieren says, he gets back to his house past eleven and his family’s more or less retracted into silence. Only his mother is left in the kitchen with a single light on, boiling a kettle with her back to the door. The outdated radio is dialled on.

A man and a woman, using the bible like a manual, are shouting back and forth. The woman is saying something about chastisement and retribution; another of the people who are starting to think the virus is a higher power’s way of cleansing the earth.

Most people sharing their opinions, on talk shows or over coffee, aren’t so die-hard and superstitious. But the opinions are spreading. And it makes sense, that it would be appealing. God’s holy fire, here to strike the blasphemous blind.

Them, the pagans, the idolaters, the apostasy of rogue messiahs. And then there are folks like Gary and Mrs. Lamb, who regard themselves as faithful abbots or champions on savage turf, bearing banners and shouting Excelsior! to the peaks of mountains. In reality, they lurk in bars, they look down at everyone through narrowed eyes down the bridges of their noses. Before The Syndrome, the buttoned-down pouting was getting old. Now, plenty of people are flocking back to them.

The PDS Give Back Scheme more or less evaporated after Maxine Martin got evicted by her B&B and apprehended up in the city. She wasn’t charged with anything more than third-degree murder (that’s the worst you can get for killing the partially-deceased). Either a medical report was never filed, or no one is willing to acknowledge that Amy’s heart was beating before Martin drove through it with a knife.

When his mum turns around with a start to see Kieren listening from just outside the open door, she switches the radio dial off and goes back to her tea, muttering something about lunatics only looking for a reaction.

Kieren and Simon continue walking with their hands in their pockets. Kieren says, as if in passing, "I feel hungry." Simon gives him a peculiar look as he starts laughing. "Christ, Si. I feel hungry. Not rabid-hungry, just human-hungry.”

Simon shrugs. "There's got to be a Tesco or something around here." Kieren nods and takes his hand, though they’re barely two blocks from Kieren’s street. They’re playing pretend. Playing make-believe they’re real people with real digestive systems and real grocery lists and real errands. Interlopers. Charlatans. Saying, _how about a game of charades? Guess what I am. One word, five letters. Take a guess._

_Alive? Is this how alive looks?_

The first petrol station they find, they enter the convenience store. No cover-up, nothing. Playing 'mates picking up booze for a party' or 'young couple stopping in the middle of a road trip,’ like that alone wouldn’t raise eyebrows. Like they weren't doomed from the start. It feels like crossing a dangerous threshold.

Already they've got this giddy, sly gait about them. They're doing something forbidden. Someone is going to notice, jab their fingers at them and call them impostors. _Let’s dress up in costumes, let’s walk like we’ve somewhere to go. It’s a masquerade. It's a cheap pantomime. It’s a game._

Kieren is nerving himself for what they’re about to walk into, his face twisting and then solidifying in a ridiculous way. Simon can’t keep from grinning. Jesus, he wants to kiss him.

When the doors slide open, a woman picking up a prescription at the pharmacy glances at them, clears her throat, then looks back to a television built into a corner of the ceiling set to a live news station. Simon realises he hasn’t been in any kind of market since before he died.

Cold polyphrenic ceiling lights drenching them in lurid shades of skim milk and collecting under cheekbones like rainwater in a gutter, tiled mausoleum floors and aisles full of half-spoiled yoghurt—it’s hardly biblical, but Simon still half-expects someone over the intercom to announce, ”We're burning heretics in aisle seven.” Here is the church, here is the steeple. Here are the racks of beer, here is the cough medicine.

Out of sight of the few civilians, Simon grabs Kieren by the shirt. Turns him around so his back is to the front of the store, leans toward him with a force. There’s poetic justice in kissing among the canned fruits and frozen peas, head pressed against the glass doors of the freezer, knocking over all those non-perishables. The raw beef shrink wrapped and parcelled-up. Simon wonders if that's how his heart looks, callow and frozen and ground up into red bricks.

Simon runs his fingertips through Kieren's hair, like maybe if Kieren kisses the hell out of him, it will save him. _The oracle is in aisle six, giving out prophecies at bargain price._ The mouthpiece of the dead is next to the procession of lager and five pound wine in all of his celestial glory, pressed against one of the courageous damned. Simon wraps his arms around Kieren’s frame and pulls him closer, and Kieren lets him.

It hurts to pull away, the joints of their fingers still entwined. Kieren’s entire appearance is tousled in an endearingly puerile way. When Simon glances over the row of confections, middle aged women are prattling at the checkout line under their breath. Stifling laughter without bothering to rearrange his rumpled clothing or steady his sudden vertigo, he chokes out, "Quick, just grab something." Kieren picks up a package of biscuits and puts it down on the counter, as well as a handful of pocket change.

_Don’t you know we’re invisible? Don’t you know we’re ghosts, and they look right through us? Your parents still set the table. We’re pretenders, I keep saying. We’re infernal spirits and sorcery and downtempo death throes and crossroads deals._

They stagger outside just as the lights above the convenience store turn on with a hiss; an act of defiance against the sedate twilight. Kieren pulls him to the side of the building, next to an ice machine and rows of dumpsters. He rips open the package.

A few anxious bites later, he's doubled over the grass next to the curb, spitting and then dry heaving.

Simon whispers, "This was a stupid fucking idea.” He steadies Kieren until he manages to stand.

Simon guides him to the curb in front of the ersatz row of white lights and neon signs and scratch card advertisements of the storefront, saying, "Come on, take a break. We can try again later." They sit, feet on the stained tar. Kieren looks stupendously disappointed. He failed. He couldn't keep it down.

"Look, don't worry about it." Simon says, nudging his shoulder. "Maybe it'll just take some time. You don't have to adjust all at once."

Before Simon can stop Kieren, he’s already worked up the mettle to take another bite. He barely coughs, he chews and swallows.

 

Simon remembers, before he dies, standing in a gas station parking lot like this one, smoking unfiltered Shepheard's Hotel cigarettes from a green box. Back when nicotine worked. Back when each roll of paper is nothing more than a Hail Mary that turns into an 'I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,' him imagining unlatching the hose at the filling station and letting the accelerant pool at his feet. Him imagining flicking lit stubs to the ground, saying, _Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee._ Going up like a saint at the stake, saying, _Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe fire._

Thing about Prometheus is that he never talks about arson. He doesn’t talk about Joan of Arc, tied to a pillar. Deep down, he doesn’t love humanity. He loves their incinerators, their kilns. He loves what torches their every molecule.

Since Simon’s met Kieren, though, he's always wanted to go back to a proper church. Doesn't care what kind; Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu. It makes sense to thank someone for something good. Old habits.

When he’s alive, he’s good at getting hurt and then healed and then hurt and then healed again. What is he if not a ragdoll? Forearm bending the wrong way, breaking his arm like a harp string under a hammer, opening stitches on his eyebrow, filling his ankle with screws. If they try to put a cast on him, he vows to take a handsaw to them, eat the alcohol swabs out of their cabinets, knock back a Clorox bottle. Pull the tubes off the antibiotic drip bag hanging from the metal pole that follows him everywhere.

It doesn’t taste like a revolution. It tastes like Jameson, like vomit, and a little like a speechless car ride with his mother.

He's got this memorised. Neurontin, Prozac, Zyprexa. The way he can drag a match head across his tongue, tinder his bones. His blood is Jack Daniels thin, but it lights just fine.

 

Five minutes after Kieren is saying, with a proud smile, "Hey, I did it. Look at this, I did it,” biting into his first real meal the way a circus acrobat bows amidst applause, Simon is back in the store packing his arms full of all the crisps and sweets bars he can grasp with his two hands. He heaps the pile of bright-coloured foil on the counter, flashes the woman a gratified smile as she narrows her eyes and rings them up. He lurches outside and drops them at Kieren's feet.

"Thank God. I'm starving. I think I'm hungrier than I've ever been in both my lives combined. Other than, you know. Being rabid." He rips into a toffee crisp. He stuffs it into his mouth within seconds. "I haven't had a meal in... how many years is it again?" Kieren peels the tab off an ice cream. He seems to get a brain-freeze when he eats it all too fast, and looks both pained and immensely satisfied. He doesn't look a bit nauseous, now that he's had practice.

By the time it's dark, Kieren and Simon have laid themselves out on the grass like wrung-out laundry, wrappers crumpled in the grass like schmaltzy, tin foil space debris. Simon sits cross-legged, picking leaves out of Kieren’s sweater and brushing the hair from his forehead affectionately.

He tries to imagine how it will be with Kieren warming up, going through the not-quite-grown-up limbo, buying an apartment, maybe going to college. Kieren and Simon commuting together, buying a dog together, sharing books and headspace. Trading off washing the dishes and mopping the kitchen. Buying furniture. Learning to live like real-life people the way toys live in a dollhouse.

Simon knows how he'll always be: bled out with a tap until he’s transparent enough to be a phantasm of himself, an ethereal being only vacationing in the land of the living.

He wonders if he isn't building up a fool's paradise. _The mind is it's own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell._ He's so cold, he might as well be a glass sculpture or a broken kitchen appliance. He wouldn't doom his own worst enemy to a life alone with himself. _A heaven of hell. A hell of heaven._ There aren’t even enough parts of him worth hating.

There are stories about astronauts who have been in orbit for years. They come home, and they're always dropping glasses of water expecting them to float away. Their muscles atrophy in space and where they would usually regrow scar tissue and fine-tune themselves for heavy lifting, they start to break down.

The astronauts have to practice walking again. Bring their legs out of light speed. They still feel the fissions and fusions inside stars. Try to forget the gamma rays they’ve see through telescopes. At night they hear the quasars in their ears, travelling like alien love letters to earth.

They wake up thinking their bed is on the ceiling, the closet on the other wall directly beneath them. See everything in redshift. They watch dust collect like the layers of soot on the control panel, back when they would turn on the cooling fans inside the CPU and the dust would fly around the terminal.

_What I mean is, if I were ever to change trajectory from the eclipse circling around you, it would take a lifetime to adjust to the new force of attraction; the magnetic pull on top of me. I'd be dropping pens and tripping over my feet for years._

Lying on the damp grass, it's as good a time as any. "Are you still going to..." _Care about me. Linger around me like you aren't providing saintlike atonement with your mere presence. Ransack a shitty convenience store like it's what we were designed to do._ "You know, stick around? When you're alive? If this all works out?"

Kieren sits up, leans on his elbow. "That's an utterly stupid question, Simon. Course I will. Why, will you still want to be around me?" He's snickering, but he can't entirely hide his uncertainty, leaning over the edge of a precipice.

_I feel fucking Presbyterian. I feel like Stonewall Jackson with my arm sawed off. I am delirious and you are Antietam. You’re the Battle of Blood River._

"That's a much more stupid question.”

"Well, then, that settles it."

  

* * *

 

Simon's had another nightmare. One where a pack of wolves eats his mother. She's walking through a graveyard when they circle her and pounce. He’s one of the wolves. She falls into an empty rectangle in the ground; then she's Amy, shaking and covered in blood. A pounding like a metronome fills his ears, and he's in his own bedroom. The dream ends when he steps through his old house, glass in the carpet crackling under his feet.

His stomach twists as he's shocked awake. He untangles himself from the sheets, teeters out of bed and walks to the kitchen, his hair still mussed and a stale taste in his mouth. Like he’s performing a ritual, a four A.M. divination, nocturnal charlatan casting lots of bones to clear the haze from his head. He feels through the dark. Staggers to the refrigerator, which has a broken light. Oddly, a few straggling condiments remain on the gridded shelves. No real food.

He finds a tupperware bowl of the sheep’s brains left over from the Undead Only party (couldn’t get rid of them, could he?—old habits). Peels off the top.

The little pale scraps are more gauzy and smooth than you’d expect, and work instantly like heavy amphetamines. He forces himself to think: of his mother, Amy, his own face with a keen snout and glinting eyes; and swallows one wrinkled organ.

He’d tried—really tried, while he was living—training a good heart so many times before. He'd think of his father and wonder what he would do if he could see him as he was, praying with his eyes tight shut in the corner of dark, smoke filled bars, to see if that made him feel anything.

Being undead made it all easier, of course. The neurotriptyline got hold of his mind and moulded it into something that wouldn't grow bitter with abstinence, that wouldn't reject sobriety.

He’d used Zippo lighters to see how charred up he could get the interior of his lungs, saying to himself _God created the earth in seven days. God created us when he created light._ So, he's giving in again. He really is a self-fulfilling prophesy. He's in a slump, which happens with him when the glamour of his afterlife dwelling wears off. Sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. _This too will pass._

Next thing he knows, he’s taking the short jaunt to Kieren’s. He’s going to tell him all about his most often recurring nightmares and he’ll interpret them, like Belteshazzar in the bible. It’ll all be fine. He’ll finally tell him the primary thought running through his mind. That revenants prey on human flesh, yet only crave vengeance. Haunting only those that caused their death, which makes sense. Simon’s been tormenting himself for years.

He's careful to avoid the spotlights cast by neighbour's windows, frilly curtains filtering the hydrogen lamps of people who've begun to leave their lights on at all hours. Around the PDS community (not that he runs with those lackeys, not anymore) rumours have been going round of living calling in to have suspicious PDS dragged back to the Treatment Centre.

To Simon, the Treatment Centre, is just like the hospital he went to while living. He hates the smell of that place. He hates the sterile walls, the surgeons in scrubs smoking outside the doors, deathbed scenes framed by catheters. The plastic sheeting over everything, the thick Plathian haze. A lukewarm bathtub the maid scrubs clean after the old man dies inside.

Si turns up outside Kieren’s second-story window and decides it's a good idea to start chucking rocks at the pane like the star-crossed sweetheart in some twisted film in which everyone’s dead and off their heads on brains.

Kieren jumps to the window immediately, at first perplexed and then poorly repressing an amused grin. He leaves the window to go downstairs.

He opens the back door and Simon practically falls into him, feels as if he’s gurgling salt water, likely blubbering. He's probably trying to kiss him, the way Kieren did that night before Amy died in the spur of the moment, unprepared. Kieren looks wide awake. Probably hasn't slept at all. He pulls Simon away from him and searches his face. "What are you doing?” He can tell, immediately. “Oh, Jesus. Sheep’s brains? Really, Simon?”

Simon doesn't speak, only looks down and fiddles with his scarring. He's been wanting to scratch at it (some kind of psychosomatic itch) and now he's got no self control to impede his fingernails, moving across his numb skin.

As far as Simon is concerned, all doctors are arch enemy material. He'd heard the story of Lady Lazarus: a patient etherised upon a table. The doctors charge her back up, thinking they must be the Good Samaritans in the parable, each time with five hundred volts and a metal plate to her chest. Every time she wakes up, she vows to devour them. So they’ll never revive her again. And it's true, who wishes for immortality? Who asked her if this was what she wanted?

And the Sibyl of Cumae: hanging in a cage, begging to die once she's seen the future. Once a great oracle, overshadowing the fates themselves, The Sibyl is granted eternal life by Apollo, as many grains of sand as she holds in her hands. The Sibyl will live for a thousand years, but she begins to wither away. Her body grows small, until only her voice is left.

Kieren has been searching Simon's face for some indication he isn't okay. God knows Kieren’s used to that, getting all shuffled out like a deck of cards with bullets in the aces and wearing a well-practiced poker face the entire time. Simon knows about the panic attacks. Kieren knows about the chronic history of depression and addiction. This isn’t a game of bluffs, of guessing the cards dealt to them. They already know.

"Alright. Come this way." He pulls him by the arm up the stairs to a window leading on to the roof and pushes open the glass. "I don't want to wake up Jem." He climbs through the opening into the dark. Simon follows, watching his hands to see if they hit against something solid. He finds a slanted surface, and pulls himself up.

After closing the window behind them, Kieren sighs. "You know you're ridiculous, right? You shouldn't be drugging yourself up like that, even if you are dead. Your brain isn't some chemistry set you can drench in chemicals on a whim." Kieren crawls toward the very edge of the roof. He seems upset, Simon realises. Simon pulls him back a bit, by instinct, before he dangles his feet off the ledge.

"And what about you? This, finding ways to get close to death. That's a bad habit, too."

"It isn't dangerous. I used to come out here all the time when I was alive."

"Yeah, and I used to get high." He might've garbled that, a bit. He's dazed, but he still seems to be coherent. He's trying to make a point, but it might not have come across.

Kieren is quiet for a minute, then pushes himself back to Simon, who's leaning against the wall.

"Fine. No more. But this is a two-way contract."

Simon looks off into the nightscape that is Roarton, blood-curdlingly silent with its dried up brambles, abandoned croquet sets, painted wooden flamingoes, the dim foreboding of an air raid siren about to go off or nukes about to drop.

It edges on paranormal, really, how quiet the rural town has become. Creaking floorboards, old women sitting on their back patios. Collecting papers from their doorsteps, opening and closing their blinds, giving their kids money for the drugstore. Dr. Russo's office gets crowded with mild fevers turned to lethal bugs out of pure unease. It's not as if the professionals could do much for them even if they did know what was happening.

"I'm pretty messed up." Simon finally says. "I mean, I've always been pretty messed up. But things were going so well. Sometimes I'm so incredibly happy and it feels like it'll always be that way. But it all goes to shit, every time."

It was all so new and optimistic, those first few days Kieren seemed to get better. Simon felt safe enough to allow himself dreams of Kieren alive and well, Kieren telling his family everything while he and Simon hold hands under the table, Kieren growing up and growing old with crow's feet and laugh lines on the edges of his pretty lips rather than a furrowed brow and worried eyes. Kieren with blood in his face, if that's what he needs. The rest is collateral.

But, no, idealism sits in prison. His hopes fall on their sword again. He's deathly afraid Kieren is in trouble. He’s fighting another string of manic freak-outs, coming undone like a spool, which is only what happens every time he sticks around. He knows himself too well.

Kieren frowns, and says in a tremolo voice, "Well, what were you expecting? Yeah, it hurts. It hurts for me, too." He gestures to his head, like the tumour it is for an operation he can't afford. "Were you expecting true love to save you? Well, shit, Simon. I wish."

"I thought the nightmares might stop," Simon answers, dumbly.

The nightmares: Kieren spending twelve years (he knows how long, somehow) standing in a foggy cul-de-sac with his mother’s red lipstick smeared across his mouth. All-white: tennis shoes, socks, shorts, t-shirt.

Kieren saying, "Talk to me about how you pretended to be a wolf when you were eleven and how you’d haul dead animals from the road up to the treehouse just so you could pretend to eat wild meat without your parents finding out." This never happened. Simon is embarrassed that he knows about the wolf.

Kieren calling him an electric chair. Simon calling him a dead stag dragged to the side of the highway.

"Come on. Neither of us are a prescription drug. We've just gotta keep each other safe for a while longer."

There’s a lot of things Simon hasn’t said yet, that he might someday. St. Augustine’s _Confessions: to Carthage_. The way the story goes, Carthage is razed to the ground by Romans. The Romans sow the land with salt, so nothing can grow there ever again.

He feels as if he's pressing his face to doors and feeling the warmth, the doorknob hissing, and he knows the feeling, but now it’s on the other side.

Telling Kieren, _I talk about you like a man prays in a burning church._

Telling him, _Then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears._

He leans on his shoulder. "Next time, come straight here before you do anything stupid. I'm a bit of an insomniac, anyways."

He twines their fingers together as they both look intently at their hands, weaving in and out. "Yeah okay." His eyelids feel heavy.

"Kieren?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine." Kieren's hands shake ever so slightly in his.

"I know. Me too.”

 

Simon eventually nods off to Kieren talking about galvanism. The Frankenstein kind. Some hermitic kid dissecting animals in his attic, gluing together mice’s skeletons like model rockets and cutting open frogs.

"A scientist touched one of his frogs, recently dead, with a scalpel, and the leg twitched. All he needed was a current of electricity. They thought they could pulse something through the brain and… boom… they could create life. They thought life was just electricity.” Simon drags his fingernail across the roof tiles, and pretends it makes a spark.

“Hey, the sun’s rising.” He says, stones in his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. Go to sleep.”

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Jem and Steve and Sue aren't home, which Kieren says is odd. "Maybe mum's gone shopping? Jem wasn't meant to start school yet, but y'know how she is. God knows where dad's gone."

Kieren’s been reading stacks of scientific journals, finds pictures of a lagoon where they brought carriers, battleships, destroyers, auxiliary vessels, and blew them up to test how much live ordnance it took when they were still dry running explosives. They even used animals to see what happened to living things. It’s a landscape view of a ship graveyard. He spreads the pictures out on the floor in front of him.

Just after Hiroshima came the generation of people who finally realised how little would keep their fingers off the Button during the Missile Crisis. Thought that if they had children, raised sons, they’d be bringing them into forty years in a bomb shelter feeding on sunlamps and Campbell’s. Into a waste land of roving cycloptic cannibal humpbacks and radiation, bled white and bombed flat. Ash Wednesday every day. No clean water anywhere.

Kieren says he used to keep a list of all the ways the world could end. His own personal Red Scare; he added to it every day he was living. Anything from planet heartburn to the clathrates and methane under the ocean. The honeybees dying out.

“Rogue black holes.” He lists. “Nuclear winter. Supergerm. Asteroid. Verneshot. Global dimming.” That humanity hasn’t offed itself yet is miraculous. Statistically, they shouldn’t be here at all. If the zombie apocalypse didn’t get rid of them, not much can.

About then; that’s when Simon lifts back the curtains and sees a row of black figures, like reapers with scythes or vultures circling a carcass—officers with bulletproof vests and shoulder patches with the treatment centre logo stitched neatly on, like the bands the HVF used to wear in place of police badges.

The same people once intercepted a ULA meeting rumoured to be parceling out blue oblivion in those harmless little vials, wrestled them to the ground, put sacks over their faces and carted them away, the whole lot. That's what they told everyone at the commune. Simon knows what happens next, and he isn't ready to go off like a toddler throwing a tantrum, kicking and screaming. He doesn't want to be hauled off like a criminal on TV with a black hood over his head, either.

There are no sirens, no police lights. Far more uniforms than could possibly be necessary, crowded around the bungalow. A few already charging toward it.

He screams something unintelligible just as the lock snaps. Someone with a weapon in their holster shoulders through the door. blowing it clean off its frame. Simon pushes Kieren under the bed and motions for him to shut up and stop moving.

Fear is the father who shotgunned his wife and children in the kitchen before Russians could take prisoners. Isn’t that what this is? A cold war, innocuous but deadly? Just after the real war, a simulation to keep everyone satisfied. Widespread paranoia. They used to hide under desks, even though something so flimsy couldn’t stop anyone from nuking them to oblivion.

Fear rarely leads to restraint. It’s dance they do, a slow, smoky tango they spin to with self-destruct buttons clutched in their teeth. A half-step to the left, everyone loving everyone in wan, nude utopia. A half-step to the right, genocide and motorcycle gangs and children on spits.

He runs into the entrance hallway with his hands up, expecting they'll have him with his wrists behind his back, jostling him into a van while reading him his rights or docketing off the reasons he's a danger to the community (top of the list: existing). The man in the lead takes one look at him and his sickly complexion and releases two barbed prongs from the edge of a taser, spitting rays of battery-powered bristles.

He hears a series of clicks, and it isn't like a horse kicking with it's back legs or a punch from a heavyweight wrestler, he doesn't have enough live nerves for that. It's like there's an anvil on his back suddenly dragging him to the floor, a pulsation moving through his body; he goes rigid and loses control.

Is that how galvanism works? He can’t feel shit, but there goes his leg, his torso.

Thing is, it isn't over in a second like it's supposed to be. The man holds the trigger down as Simon's muscles tighten further and further. There are at least three officers crowded around him. The first one flogs him with the toe of his boot, just once. Another joins in. Little stars arc around his ribs. He thinks they're telling him to stay still and go quietly, but he can't stop shaking or answer them, he's lurching too violently. all he's got clattering around in his head is this image of a gloved hand cutting out his tongue so he won't scream when he comes to.

His edges feel hazy, prickled, like in cartoons when the man on the roof is struck with lightning and his roasted silhouette stands lagging and rippling with blue light, still smoking. How does the sermon go again? Odours are burning. Sounds are burning. Tangibles are burning. He hears a gruff voice yell, "Search the house," and he gives in.

 

* * *

 

By the time his vision focuses, and it's less like he’s wading through a radioactive swamp and more like he’s a sabre being grated against a rock, Simon is in a car. By instinct, the old mantra, the incantation from the days of laced-up shoes and buttoned-up white shirts plays over in his head: _Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come._

The back seat is lined with caging, like what they’d use to take animals with rabies to the vet before they chomp the driver's head off. Simon is fenced in from all sides, a wall separating the space in two. _Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven._ On the other side of the pen, his head between his knees and his back tugging itself back and forth, his spine hefting with each heavy breath (breathing, real breathing, a real thaumaturgy, as per the norm) is Kieren.

The vehicle is already dragging itself around a maze of barbed wire and watch towers, the landscape of the treatment centre, when Simon whispers, “Kieren.”

_Give us this day our daily bread._

Kieren sits up, his expression already steeled for a barrage like fluoride in water. "Simon. Where are they taking us?" He presses against the barrier and claws at the chinks in the chain links, fingers resting halfway through.

_Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us._

Once they've gotten inside, they're directed toward another complex of buildings, ones Simon has never been inside. "No idea," he says. Turns to the thick plexiglas window, then back to Kieren. ”Listen.” he leans in until they're face to face, hands coiled in the same wall, fingertips making contact like the cut red wire in time bomb. "Don't let them experiment. Don't listen to them, don't let them touch you." Every particle has an anti-particle, antimatter equivalent, and when they meet they annihilate one another. _Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil._

"Simon... I think my heart is beating.” They pull into a garage.

Kieren's door swings open, and a guard has him by his arm and is wrenching him away. _For thine is the kingdom._ Simon’s unlatches and a uniform with a helmet covering their face reaches from behind. _Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory._ Simon is saying, yelling, _"They can't hurt you. Don't believe a word they say."_

Clenched hands are yanking him further and further away, as Kieren is dragged to the other end of the long, underground storage facility with a long tier of shrill lights, saying, "I'll be fine, worry about yourself. I'll be fine.”

For a moment, Simon thrashes to the side and manages to dislocate the tight grip on his shirt. He runs to his right, to Kieren, kicking but otherwise abiding. _Deliver us from evil._ He strains, already muzzled by a pair of hands, _"You have to make it out, okay? I—Kieren, I... I—just, find a way to get out."_ Kier is nodding, over and over again. Like in a painting where a martyr’s limbs are being sawed off, yet his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential. His eyes are fixed on Simon.

_For ever and ever. Amen._

 

* * *

 

Simon still imagines pretty ways to die, like he did before. White-knuckled and waiting in sitting rooms. He sees his body, hacked into neat pieces like a hatchet on a chopping block. Wearing a noose like a necklace, red circle around his snapped cervix. A slough of blood thickening around his head like an aureole, a sanguine corona, as he’s pressed on his spine with an exit wound through in the back of his head.

Death was never really mysterious. It was only a place he hadn’t been before. He’d never been to Scafell Pike, Scranton, Cardiff, either. Cardiff is not a mystery.

Death was his mother buying matching crockery sets, hovering around the happy families in insurance commercials the way Simon hovered around the tables full of kids with expensive cars and perfect skin in secondary school. Like maybe if he got close enough, they and their bleached smiles would open for him, open and reveal the answer to the riddle.

They didn’t. They didn’t have answers. Half their fathers had left them before they lost all their baby teeth.

Fuck boring old death, he’d told himself. Heaven is already filled to the brim with half-assed martyrs.

Make _in front of the yellow line_  on the bus your personal playground. Swing on the guardrail. Be a Benjamin Franklin lightning rod, be a tesla coil, collect Lichtenberg figures like stamps.

How to: wear your dead relatives the way members of the NRA wear necklaces made out of the shattered skulls of children killed by assault rifles.

How to: Pinch the wick of every candle during devotions, release a thin black spire of smoke. Join the unmedicated manic depressive’s hallelujah choir. Slip into reverie.

One day he ends up washing up in a back lane like rats in a dumpster. It must have taken them a few days to find him, to even realise he was missing. He finds this thought comforting.

 

* * *

 

The officers in uniform are ushering Simon through the centre’s hallways, flanking him on all sides. He isn’t even cuffed, which is like a final “fuck you” to any hopes he had of fighting his way out.

When they reach a large part of the complex, there’s a two sided mirror on the wall. Simon’s looking through, on the transparent side. They’ve put the whole sect of Roarton in a quarantine disguised as a shelter. You have all those legends about healthy carriers, about Typhoid Mary. When Apollo 11 landed, they had to wait a few weeks in a lab, just in case the moon had some lunar smallpox.

It has to be two-sided, because no one from the inside even glances his way. The Treatment Centre’s been taking PDS here without telling the civilians, protected in their small refuge.

There are blankets spread in rows on the ground (too much like the square plots of land in a spectre’s hectare, Simon imagines). There are pyramids of the belongings each family packed on their way out, when they must’ve evacuated the area. Staff pass out meals on plastic trays, hand the elderly heated cans of soup. Simon wonders how long people've been stockpiling bottled water.

Jem and Steve and Sue are huddled in a corner of the refuge, barely masking their haggard concern. He can see through the thick glass, Jem is more peaked and hollow-eyed than ever. An encampment in the promised land, but they’ve left their brothers behind. He moves to the door, but a one of the officers puts an arm across his chest and commands, “Living only.”

They keep going, to a wing of offices that they used for PDS checkups when they were recovering here. This entire building’s long been deep-sixed. Things like a spreading rot on the tile floor, missing air vents, holes in the ceiling. They haven’t used this place for years.

 

* * *

 

Since one day he’ll become his own executioner, Simon makes a promise to be creative about it, to become a semiprofessional freeway semi truck matador, to sing “we shall overcome” as loudly as possible and as often as possible, to treat heroin as a viable breakfast option. To catch the knife by the handle.

He’s taking spoonful after spoonful of bleach, as if to purge him from the inside out, as every member of his extended family stands around him to watch the ceremony. They observe and do not smile. It’s supposed to look like a christening, but he’s so red it’s more like a vigil. He’s been dead for longer than he remembers. Someone’s lifting their hands and praying over his dead body, but it doesn’t move.

He imagines he’s put the staple gun to his face, his body in the clothes dryer, and turns it on. Closes his own throat in the cabinet door.

One of his ancestors, who looks just like him, is holding a bible, saying, _All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath._ He says that The Almighty has redeemed him, despite his sins. Simon asks, _Where? Where has he redeemed me? Show me, I can’t find the place._ His hands, his arms.

There are body parts named after people. Adam’s apple. Achilles tendon. Thebesian veins. Pores of Kohn. Island of Reil.

He begins to believe in transubstantiation. Friday night Eucharist, the lavish family dinners of stiff conversation. He devours his mother with an ugly, keening cry. She is beating her fists on the walls of him, the dank larder where strips of her hang from hooks, on meat chandeliers.

His mother holds his grandmother’s bible to her breast. Some nights, Simon gets down on his knees beside his bed and crosses his hands. Sometimes he lies prostrate on the floor. Closed eyes, listening to his mother’s shaking memory. She’s somewhere inside him, howling. This isn’t what growing up is supposed to be.

How to: find yourself in a cannibal’s pantry; donate your entire body to charity; live in a medicine cabinet; drive your parents’ truck into the water tower and drown rickety old Israel, turn it to the Sea of Galilee in the middle of draught.

In his mouth, the cuticles of his fingernails, his weak knees, he sees not only her but every ancestor she ingested—her mother, and her mother’s mother, and onward; each consumes the last.

Like a matryoshka doll, a kishke of filthy roots. They devour each other and cannot digest themselves—an ouroborosian wreathe, like the legend about the snake swallowing its own tail. He can’t escape their physiological legacies of melancholia, genetic indigestion polluting his insides. Their half-life lasts for generations. They are parasites, creepers that climb the trellis-like double helix of his being, and, eventually, they will strangle him.

 

* * *

 

When he's alive, the hospital is his abbey, ringing with Gregorian chants of "turn up the morphine." Drugged up kids with stitches up their arms. Dementia patients calling for their dead wives. Monastery of hand sanitiser and slowly dropping vitals. Of "how many fingers am I holding up?" Of maybe liver transplant, but never support group and always anonymous. He’s like the demigod of numbness. Choosing that over pain, every time.

How to: trepan your skull with a hacksaw and drink the fine cognac that foams out; sneak kirsch from a listerine bottle, promise you are remorseless and come to the funeral anyway. Don’t stop putting your hand on the stove. Rip out the IV drip.

Then one day he wakes up and his vision is diagonal. He doesn't ache all over, he thinks he must be swimming in anaesthetic. They left a blood pressure cuff on his arm, like they expected it to read something. His tongue is made of phosphorous. The first thing he remembers are the stark naked walls of the centre, then the smell of germolene. Oil of wintergreen. Windows locked shut. No soreness, only a throbbing. And a headache, in the part of his brain that could still feel pain.

The rest of his time at the treatment centre is served with his edges dulled and senseless. He's grateful for that.

 

* * *

 

An officer behind him forces him through a hall and into what looks to be a standard doctor’s office. Grey cupboards and dismal carpeting and an examination table covered in plastic. Posters covered in livers sliced and labeled with bright colours. A stethoscope hanging on the wall.

“Listen, we’re about to take a sample of your blood.” A doctor dressed entirely in antibiotic shades of white stands at a hazardous wastes container, pulling a plastic glove over his outstretched fingers. “We’re going to test it to see if… well…to see if you’ve got the virus.” He turns to Simon with a nervous smile on his face. Another doctor stands at the wall, assessing the threat.

They have white masks strapped across their mouths, like they could be hiding werewolf teeth. The other one has a syringe held carefully between her index finger and thumb. Syringe. _Pain. Release. That Christmas spent vomiting on the lawn. That disheveled mattress I wanted to burn when I sobered up for a single week._

How to: join a Children’s Crusade; believe apocryphal balladry about a Holy Land that is probably only a junkie den.

What’s that word association game psychoanalysts are supposed to play? They sit in a room and shout words at you. Think fast. They say: Hospital. _Altitude sickness._ Want. _Air_. Need. _Oxygen mask._ Speak. _Heart._ Word. _Attack_. Language. _Pump._ Dialect. _Ischemia._ Vernacular. _Haemorrhoid._ Fear. _Pump. Pump_. Love. _Pump. Pump. Pump._

There’s a circuit twined throughout the twisted steel of his insides, and something is looping through it. _Pump. Pump._ Simon could swear his heart’s beating at last. But it could only be his brain thudding around in his skull, his numb hands twitching, the gathering blur at the edge of his vision. _Pump. Pump. Pump. Kieren. Kieren’s heart. Not mine._ His palms are sweating.

The doctor reaches for his forearm to pull his shirt up. Fight or flight. Simon makes a run for it, slamming through the heavy gunmetal door. Something desolate and baying screams past his ears. Hands. _Shove_. Boots. _Kick_. Teeth. _Gnash_.

The first doctor grabs his arm before he makes it two doors down the hallway. An officer has cornered him and tosses him by the collar, like a negligent schoolboy caught smoking in the locker room, back into the office.

The doctor moves him to the table, coarsely but agitatedly; he’s not used to roughhousing patients. ”Listen, we don't want to hurt you. But we're just not equipped to deal with aggression. Have you taken a standard dose of neurotriptyline in the last twenty-four hours?" Simon thrusts his shoulders against the outspread hands holding him down. “Is he going rabid?” The left doctor screeches, turning to the right. “No, no, he’s just reacting to panic. Get the antipsychotic.”

The guard in the doorway interjects. "What's all the fuss for?" She narrows her eyes. "He's not going to be in any pain." In a taunting voice, "Hey, rotter, what're ye struggling for? Bragging rights?” The other two are already forcing something, familiar in scent, down his throat.

The walls move and spin. The ceiling hits him again and again in the centre of his forehead. The part of his mind that goes human when he injects the neurotriptyline, it's slipping away from him. He can feel his pupils contracting, like a lycanthrope’s staring into a bad moon rising. Everything smells stronger. He can't move, he can feel the doctors strapping his legs and arms down.

How to: split your sides; become a parasite in the host body of someone you love; grow intimate with a hungry lion.

The hallucinations start up, engines revving to life with a bright, search-beam vengeance. A platter, a teaspoon, a paring knife. A bullet shell in the centre of the plate beside the delicate silverware, the baroque shell patterns on a folded napkin; like an appetiser, hors d’oeuvres. Something palatable for rich diners to chew on. Simon slices the knife through the sharp metal.

How to: throw a soirée during the Night of the Long Knives; do some interior decorating. Paint a nice mural of inverted pentagrams on every wall.

How to: feed yourself to hungry gutters; give your blood, the only tithe in the silent amnion of the church; become a gunslinger of testaments and alms for the poor. Impale yourself on the conical towers of churches.

One of the doctors is saying, muffled, “You’re reacting to nervous tissue appropriated from a primate brain. The glial cells in the prefrontal cortex are like a tranquilliser for PDS. Your system isn’t taking to it very well. Hm. High tolerance? Anyway, you should be feeling a bit drugged up. Don’t worry about it.” He rubs a cotton swab on Simon’s arm. “This won’t hurt a bit. Like you need me to tell you that.”

A room full of revolutionaries with their red pins and buckets of blood to spill at the feet of parading conquerers, putting their hands over their hearts. Swearing to their Lord and Saviour they'll never let another person see them cry. _Not again, God, not again. I'm not fireproof._

Kieren is lying crumpled on the ground, in the street. Adolescent and only barely beaten down by the gang of kids that used to torment him. Only it’s happening right now, right in front of Simon. Choking out blood. Tears streaming from his eyes.

Why is this familiar?

Kieren? _The dead country dog._ Wounds? _The thousand maggots feasting on her dark coat._ Street? _The deep ditch my father buried her in._ Regrets? _I prayed that night. I prayed to the dog._ Saviour? _Not me. Never me._

Simon is on the street, too. He kneels down and pulls Kieren to the sidewalk. He turns him over to lay on his back. His eyes are closed and he’s softly moaning in pain. A surge of rage courses through him as he imagines chasing the people who did this and beating them down with his bare hands. (He could, if he chose to.)

How to: love the boy without a voicebox; nurse the cadaver back to life.

Somewhere, Simon hears a door open. The other doctor shrieks, “Keep him out of here. We’re in the middle of a procedure.”

A woman is saying, “No, it’s fine.” Someone pushes their way through the two figures with their surgical scrubs draped across them like the white robes of angels of mercy. They stagger backward, Kieren hurtles through with his determined trot, finds Simon, and seizes his hand, looking over his arm. Simon looks past him at the tall, auburn-haired woman. She’s a chromatic blur when his eyelids finally close.

 

His mother is dredging the lake, pulling out his body, dressing him in his Sunday best, and having a dinner party.

He’s face down, lead in his belly and blood permeating his clothes like liquid through a coffee strainer. She’s speaking in tongues, saying _you’ll be okay._ He’s not okay, he’s dead, but she’s dragging him back home, smiling and making conversation. _Tomorrow we can go sailing, like we used to. We can get out of here, you can wear your favourite sweater, you can feed the pigeons bread crumbs._ She wrangles his stiff limbs into the water basin, turning on the tap, warm water soaking into his clothes.

_You'd like that, wouldn't you?_ Lifting his chin, smoothing over his hair like on a doll with ball-jointed rigor mortis. _Your favourite sweater, so you won't catch a cold. You're always so cold._ The bath water is turning pink. His skin is sallow and bloated. Her hands are covered in his blood.

Even after she’s pounded out the silt washed up in his stomach (don't they know, blood is just the body's replacement for brackish water?), she paints his face with a smile and sits him at the table. She makes breakfasts, complaining _you haven’t touched your food._

His mother is setting mannequins around the table, open-mouthed, stiff limbs bent in all the right directions. They never frown or argue, as the perfect family should. He shouldn’t be trying to set up living rooms to feel like his mother’s womb and he shouldn’t be keeping postcards, and he shouldn’t be thinking about NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the Space Race like they never ended.

She starts to keep him in cupboards, like a kidney thief; next to the nightgowns in her closet, in the salt shakers, in table spoons, in the drawer of her bedside table, in the neat little teacups with the marigold florets painted around the lip. The dishes stacked in kitchen drawers are dripping with him. Trickling down the chef knife on the counter. His mother is hitting him with a meat tenderiser, dicing him, boiling water. Bunching flowers in a vase full of his blood.

Simon is growing up in an anaemic home with his mother’s test tubes laid out on the kitchen table, growing daisies out of conical flasks and laying them on the windowsill side by side. Peonies in the kitchen, tulips in the drawing room.

She entombs him so deeply he might as well be alive. This is how she makes a family. She stacks every person she’s ever wanted to possess in rows in the foundation of her house, saying _good night, see you tomorrow._

 

* * *

 

Simon comes to in a room with two single size mattresses, spotless sheets folded at the feet of each. There's a single lamp, and the walls are bare.

He rattles the doorknob. This isn't the first time he's woken up somewhere foreign with the urge to bleach his brain. The door is locked tight. He pushes against it a few times, hits the cold surface with his fists, out of necessity. It doesn’t give.

He perches himself uneasily at the edge of one of the beds. Jittery, curls his hands over the sides and holds himself to the ground.

In ancient Byzantium, crowds would wait for someone to be sainted before unearthing the holy bodies and looting the pieces. Good stock, like ears and limbs. Stragglers were left to masses of flesh and tissue but held it close as if to make them reverent in themselves.

A piece of the True Cross. Sebastian’s little finger. The holy water Gentiles drank. Mary’s milk, a lock of Cecilia’s hair, left hand of Jude, fragment of Dymphna’s skull, bag of whatever’s left of Dominic.

It's thirty minutes before he hears a click. The doorknob slides ominously. The first face he sees is the helmeted, visored, determined face of an officer, who enters and stands to the right as Simon stiffens and jumps to his feet. The officer looks expectantly at the door. Simon braces himself for another doctor, marching behind in all their omniscience. God, he’s so high strung. He’s going to break his neck.

But it’s not a doctor, it’s Kieren. He doesn’t make eye contact with the officer. He sits on the bed across from Simon and fumbles with his fingers, knotting them together between his legs without looking up.

He's wearing new clothes, making Simon wildly uncomfortable. Simon shoots daggers at the guard standing above them beside the doorway. After a few moments, he leaves, slamming the door behind him.

"What the hell is happening?" Simon says under his breath, in case the guard's still outside.

"We're safe," Kieren answers. That, more than anything, sends a shiver up Simon's spine. He feels guilty for remembering; how trusting Kieren was of corrupt authority. Believing the give-back scheme wasn't a ploy for free labor, taking the high road and avoiding bar fights, keeping his head down rather than staring Roarton folks in the face. "Don't rock the boat." As long as no one pushes back, they'll swallow the cough syrup easy enough. How much would he love to believe that, believe they aren't boiling alive or bubbling at a slow simmer?

But that night at The Legion, Gary's windpipe pressed in Simon's headlock, Kieren slamming the keys on the bar. It's a bloody fireworks show. It's the breaking of the seventh seal, and Kieren's the Lion of Judah: a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. He's brave, and bright, and blinding. Christ, he is.

One of the songs he used to play on that idiotic guitar, back in the commune:

_Oh I wish that I could die for thee_

_On a technicolour Calvary_

_Egypt would be ours_

_Ten thousand years of peace._

Simon must be staring dumbly at Kieren, because he shifts under his gaze.

_Oh moses, save my empty, my empty soul._

Before he can open his mouth, the door clicks and the handle turns. It swings open.

In walks the woman from the doctor’s office. Her hands are clasped behind her in a strictly judicious way. She has glasses balanced on her astute nose, a fisherman sweater creased under a lab jacket, and corkscrew hair unkempt, as if she’s had both her hands on a charged Van de Graaff generator since lunch.

Her voice is precise, clearly enunciated. “I’m Dr. Bailey Lynch. It’s absolutely vital that we speak immediately. Follow me.” She nods to the door.

“Why should we?” Simon says, almost serene.

“I know you’re scared—“

“Oh, we’re not scared. We’re just dangerous now.”

She sighs, grumbles something akin to a tsk tsk. “That’s fine.” She pulls up a chair, standing by one utilitarian desk in the corner of the room, which feels more and more like some standard issue motel room. “We can talk here.”

“Great. You can start by telling us why we’ve been kidnapped and what this virus is.”

She responds instantly. “You’re here because you are exceptionally unique. And there is no virus.”

Simon narrows his eyes at her. Kieren shifts uncomfortably. “What is it, then? Apocalypse, round two? The universe balancing itself out?”

“No, no.” She shakes her head. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Well, we’re not going anywhere.”

Dr. Lynch takes a deep breath.

She pauses to look at their faces, then lowers her eyes. “It started with Halperin and Westin’s formula. The records are buried pretty deep, but we are aware that you were the first subject, Simon, and that gave yourself nobly to the cause. I’m sorry for what you must’ve gone through.”

Simon feels spiders crawling up his back. He focuses every hemisphere of his brain on where his and Kieren’s fingertips are now touching. Kieren is looking at him, and his face feels prickly.

“At first, everything went well. Not as they’d hoped, but well enough. The stuff worked, we wanted to develop the “cure” to the point where it could bring you all the way back. And we did. We made slow adjustments, tested it on the PDS left in the Treatment Centre. Just weeks ago, we finally got results.”

She stops to decipher the looks congealing over their faces. Simon’s is taut, dead-pan, ready for the cheerless ending sure to come.

“Some blood types took to the new neurotriptyline positively. Very few, only AB, positive or negative types. The body didn’t reject it, but used it to its advantage.” Her voice cracks, in absolute awe, beaming at Kieren (and Kieren only) with childlike reverence in her more empirical eyes. “Their brains… miraculously… cranked on the generator. Their hearts gobbed out blood without question. The rest of the body responded.”

_O-types. B negatives and A positives and everything in between. What happens to them?_ Kieren and Simon remain silent, let her languish. She reads it on their faces.

"The rest, with antibodies in their plasma to fight potential threats, shut down instead. Entirely. It isn’t a virus. It’s backlash.” She swallows, hard.

Lynch turns and directs her speech toward Kieren, again. “ _But look at our success! Look at what we've done!_ We've created life, in the purest sense. We've superseded God, and you're among the first to experience it.” Gestures with her hands as if presenting an endangered species to a committee of biologists.

Simon glowers at her. He refuses to play her 'lucky few, medical miracle' game. "The rest of the undead are basically fucked, then. Where are they? Where are you keeping them all? How long do they have left?” His stiff, risus sardonicus leer has always resembled perfectly a mortuary resident’s. Finally, something useful to do with it.

She tries to steer the conversation back into her control. "Aren't you worried for yourself? Shouldn't you be waiting for your results, first?"

"Fuck my results." He bites back. "How many of these quarantine zones are there? And how many of us have you gotten treatment and a shelter?"

"Less than we can live with." She interrupts him curtly, a sudden acidity in her puckered eyes. "You don't think I'm having trouble sleeping at night? You think I'm complacent, with the responsibility I have? _Nobody else cares about you._ Other than me and my people—the vast majority of them will be happy when you're gone.”

“I don’t care. _I don’t care._ If you can’t do anything more… go to hell. You want me to beg on my knees? I have a right to live. I have that right, at least.” It feels like he’s shaking inside, shivering, and it’s all jostling its way out of him. _Do I, though? Haven’t I forgone my right to life, yet?_ Maybe he can pretend.

“We’re all scared, and we’re all dangerous. And we’re sick of being heaped in the streets to make way for you, hiding in the pyramids of our own corpses, being _ashamed_.” He always had a fire escape rather than an oral cavity, a rock-bottom apartment rotting in his teeth. “We’ve learned to stop licking your boots and apologising and we’re _insatiable_. And this time ‘round, it’s for more than brains. It’s for our fucking lives. We’re _deadly_.”

His words come out naked and breathless, screaming, _take everything you can carry. Run, break your ankles, bend your kneecaps until they shatter, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Something is burning in there._ He got so good at that, escaping. Loudly. Eloquently, even. He doesn’t have to believe it.

Lynch’s rapidly moving fingers slowly lose motion. Her next reaction is surprising, for both Simon and Kieren. She hovers stock-still, then reaches for her knotted mane of hair. She stands, pulls the strands away from her neck, and turns around.

On her nape is the still-healing scar tissue of the borehole drilled into every PDS for the sole purpose of regular injections. Varicose veins retread from the abrasive rupture in her sandy skin. She pulls back her sleeves to reveal rough patches singed grey in places, pink contractures like melted plastic, elbow covered in skin grafts. “Chemical burns. Fatal accident.” She stays very still, for several long, rheumatic moments.

Simon remembers every time he had to lift up his shirt to convert a new follower, shepherd them into the flock. The prophet would say, “Do what you have to. If they need some convincing, you know what to do.” He was an excellent billboard, freak show, seatbelt commercial, shock advertisement.

When she turns around again, she’s very quiet. “Sometimes it’s the person that cares the most that loses.” She sits down, folding her hands in her lap. “Simon… do you know your blood type?”

He pauses, his teeth clenching. “Yes. I think so.”

“…And?”

“O-negative.” He breathes out hard enough for it to sound like a laugh.

“I’m going to do the best I can. I promise.” He nods, tight-lipped.

"There's one more thing. With the neurotriptyline still acting in a PDS system, they can, potentially, be revived. With equipment, oxygen tanks. Even if their heart, for example, stops functioning momentarily."

They look suddenly up, searching her face. She takes a deep breath.

"You both are friends of Amy Dyer?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the wait time on this. After I started uni I got pretty swamped, but I managed to trudge through it. Please forgive me for any agony I've caused.


	4. Death by Water

Amy's dorm is across from Kieren and Simon's, where, Kieren assumes, they'll be spending their time for an undisclosed number of days.

The first time she comes to see them, she swings the door open with her arms wide. She's radiant in every sense of the word. Despite the generic wool jacket and dark denim ( _Amy—in real actual trousers_ ) issued to her by the Centre, her fluorescent, flushed skin is like a glass prism splitting the sun.

She pulls them both into a bear hug, squeezing Kieren and Simon tight before they have a chance to open their mouths. When they slide apart, it feels like ten long minutes before anyone has anything to say.

Kieren forgot how colourful skin really is. Sure, there's the chestnut, ginger, hazel colour either thawed by the sun or left sallow. But it's never so opaque. There are blue veins and ruddy knees, scuffed up ankles, roseate moving under a thin veneer. Ivory joints in fingers. Mulberry tracts left by the flesh. Stretch marks and birth marks and scars from childhood chicken pox.

Kieren’s the first to try at it. ”How did it feel...?" To come alive. To be buried with all your best friends above your coffin and wake up alone. Kieren can't manage to finish his sentence with the lump in his throat.

Amy considers the open-ended question. "It was hard, you know? It was near dawn, and I swear I could hear their shovels bite the dirt over the coffin, scrape against it and rattle it. I was half conscious from the moment Maxine Martin stabbed me, but it felt like I was in a straightjacket. They hooked me onto a gurney and for once I just wanted to sleep, to not be jostled and strapped down like I’d gone batshit crazy. They put something over my face, a respirator-type thing. I had to eat through tubes for about a week. And here I am."

She seems pensive before jumping back into her bubbly self. “But that’s old news. You look fantastic, Kieren! Couple weeks and you'll be getting your stitching out, I bet. Living isn't so strange once you've already done it once, or twice." Before he can answer, she seems to remember something pressing. "How’s Philip? Not too heartbroken without me? I just wish I could leave here for a day, tell him I'm fine..."

"He's not doing well. Your room's buried in roses, at this point, you know? Corny aluminium balloons, stuffed bears, gift baskets we've had to throw away. He’ll be fine when he knows you’re back, though—”

“Back? Kier, I can’t go back to Roarton. Not for a long time.”

“What do you mean?”

Before Amy answers, an interloper enters the room. A gawky Japanese girl with close-cropped hair, a bruised lip, a collared shirt the colour of burgundy wine, and a heavy bomber jacket with her hands in the pockets. She’s PDS, not wearing any cover-up, but has dark liner drawn around her eyes. All clorox pastels and rotten, ecchymosis blacks. Amy takes the opportunity to redirect the conversation.

"This is my friend, Rebecca.” Rebecca moves her hand to greet them, then decides against it. ”I met her in the commune, but… a lot has happened since then.” Amy looks back up, smiling at Kieren. “No worries, moregeous. You're not being replaced."

"Rebecca Saito." She seems callous in comparison to Amy, but the way she slopes toward her (like a plant grows toward light) shows she's already rather attached.

When she sees Kieren's pale but warm-blooded skin, her eyes open a bit wider. "Have you been to the canteen, yet? Don't eat the jelly. They've put in amphetamines that make you susceptible to mind control."

Kieren does a double take before realising she's serious. Amy playfully punches her shoulder. "Right nutter, this one. Beck's just full of conspiracy theories, is all."

"Rebecca Saito." She repeats, with the exact intonation as before. "The ceiling lights, too. Avoid phosphorous. There are drones above the whole of the Centre. And there are cameras everywhere." She becomes wary of a very specific spot of chipped paint on the wall. Kieren shifts from foot to foot. Simon's been introspectively amused throughout the ordeal.

She looks back at their skewed expressions and says, "I was joking about the drones."

"Of course." Simon says.

"Amy has to talk to you about something." She swings her arms stiffly at her sides. She turns to Amy. "Should I go?"

"Nah, Beckers." Rebecca Saito rolls her eyes at the pet name. "It's fine."

"What is it?" Kieren sits cross-legged on the floor. Amy takes the chair Lynch used just hours before.

"Two things: first, I am a bloody prodigy and knew about you and Simon from the start," Her face softens and twists into a smile. It’s so genuine, it’s the absolute imperial czar of all genuine smiles. "And of course it's fine. More than fine. You sneaks, you should've told me right away! Come on, I'm going to group hug you both, right now, so brace yourselves."

She does, a bit violently, pulling them by their necks until they hug her back. Simon visibly flinches.

"Okay, number two. Tomorrow, Lynch—don't look at me like that, Si, I've met her too—Lynch is going to ask you to do something. You especially, Kieren. I want you to know ahead of time, and I'm going to try and convince... I—look, I... I need you to say yes. Me and Becky and everyone else needs you."

"You think we can trust her?" Kieren is dubious. Simon, more so.

"You don't need to trust her. She's clever."

"I know her type," Simon says. He’s been taciturn, but engages the second Lynch is mentioned. "We can't trust her _because_ she's clever."

Rebecca Saito offers her advice: ”I heard she used to work for a secret coalition of vigilantes who used biological warfare to bring down rabid PDS.”

The declaration goes straight over Amy’s head. "She might just be our last chance, Simon. She wants to help us."

"It isn't 'us' anymore, Amy. Remember? You've stopped counting." Kieren gives Simon a look to reel him back. He'd be worried about him striking some kind of sensitive chord, but Amy's always been resilient.

"What does she want from us?" Kieren finally asks.

"I'm so sorry, but she wants to conduct experiments. Using you, Kieren.”

 

Earlier that morning—before they get the okay to meet Amy—Simon and Kieren wake up before it’s barely sunrise. As if they could sleep much at all, especially in this strange place. In their cell, as both as of yet refuse to call it out loud.

If they open the blinds, from here they can see their surroundings. A barren plateau like a large gully inside the scowling forest on all sides. Outside the barbed wire all he can see are the foundation stones and a few burnt support beams that remain of a way-station. Inside, there are guards (referred to simply as “The Patrol,” they’ve picked up since last night). Under-shaven, probably under-trained and trigger-happy; hair cut close to the scalp.

In the chain link fence (a sign warning of high electricity, though it doesn’t look like it’s been used in years) there’s pried-open rupture near the bottom. One patrol officer crouches and guards the eerie remnant of someone’s escape route, where the wiring squirms from where it was ripped or cut with sweaty, slipshod hands.

To the east, a dirty uniform is tied to what looks like a watchtower, flying like a flag in the wind. Kieren has a grim feeling it serves the purpose of widow’s weeds; something they'd play taps in front of. He looks for blood, but can’t see any from the window.

Simon’s already turned on the single TV set in their room, which wasn’t there last time Kieren remembers.

“A PDS woman in Greater London was detained and quarantined by a bunch of cops and medical responders, just today.” He says, without looking back, raw light outside covering his shoulder. “She was on the tube, puked up the breakfast she ate to keep her kids from getting tense. About her being dead and all. Someone called 999, they bagged her and brought her to a centre. She wasn’t even sick.”

Kieren wants to tell him to turn it off, but that would only aid the apprehension building in the quiet median of the crisis. “This thing, syndrome, whatever, is turning into full-fledged hypochondriac bigotry.” He’s sat at the end of his bed, wearing the milquetoast flannel pyjamas from the centre, with the sweater he got to keep pulled over.

Even in the woolgathering of the lukewarm, porridge-washed morning, Kieren feels a fear run through him. A jolting reminder of the time before meeting Simon he spent as a butcherbird; knobby-kneed, hollow boned, terrified. Still scared that soon, something will go wrong, and all of this will end. They’ll be separated, it’ll get bad again. Kieren will survive, even if he doesn’t want to.

He’ll be like the haunted coat-rack of the war veteran’s wife. Island of dolls the family won’t sell once their daughter dies of cholera. Everything after will be haunted. He imagines thirty years from now he’ll be standing in a kitchen, in his own house when this is all over, and the memory of this exact moment; dwarfed and stretched; will blink and travel through him like a tourist or a homesick ghost. He’ll eat biscuits and find a cold spot. Teabags that bring hallowtide and tighten his hands around the searing cup.

He’s already convinced he’s a quarter ghost on his father’s side. He’s already rearranged furniture, new paint; layers of old wallpaper curling up the walls—trying to forget his body count of imaginary friends.

He moves to the other bed, next to Simon, and lays his head on his shoulder. A chill goes through him, starting in his chest.

“Tell me that nothing’s going to happen to us, okay?”

“I don’t know.” Like Simon is done lying. Done telling people what they want to hear. “I really don’t, I’m sorry.”

They try not to move for the rest of the morning.

 

“Come on, now. She asked for you, specifically. All she needs is some data.”

Kieren’s immediate gut feeling is an odd cocktail of jittery nerves and estrangement. This is a betrayal, a fraternisation with an enemy; a wineglass full of charcoal, dust, sharpened stones. Lynch standing with a hand on Amy’s shoulder, recruiting her for the job. Jesus, his tongue is rock salt. If anyone could sway them, it’d be her and her foster-care nature, maternal fervour.

“She says I’m too far living to help much. You’ll gain their trust. And with all the guards outside… I’m starting to get shivers.”

Simon must not have told her everything about his time served in the Treatment Centre. If he had, she wouldn’t have dared walk in that austere bedroom, poised for a strike, expecting to salvage him.

But Simon had already painted a vivid picture inside of Kieren’s head. How they (the scientists) would draw little red Xs over where they were about to cut inside, excise with their scalpels. How every day they shot him up with something new and he never felt a thing and they'd make another red X, name a new chemical equation. They'd look at his DNA, wind it all out for him, play at it like a harp, pick apart every strand of the ladder and every notch of the backbone.

Simon’s found refuge in his and Kieren’s bunker, furniture propped against the door, everyone else shut out. Retrogression. Amy should’ve known better. Hitting chair legs on the walls, picking apart the heaviest things to fortify his tent city, shanty town for a migrant in a strange place. Kieren is just outside the door, forehead against the cold surface.

He tries to keep as quiet as possible, maybe doesn’t know Kieren’s even there. After Amy’s plea, reviving dead relics he’d probably wanted to keep locked up in the hermit-church, he’d gone quietly. Kier saw in infinite, painful detail as something darkened his vision, and he slunk back to that general anaesthetic chamber of his mind, trudged like someone bewitched away from the other three. And Kieren, he was already nodding along, ready to agree to do… whatever. Nonchalant towards Simon’s fears and associations, ready to do what he needed to save Simon just a little bit. Speed along the process.

Now, Amy’s resigned to stay out of it, Rebecca Saito dutifully at her side in their room. Kieren slides down the door, pushing and swivelling the handle.

“Simon.” Not a question, but an affirmation. _Hey, I know what this is. Don’t you think I know why people keep a death grip on electric fences? That I know why you wouldn’t want to line each new prison with housewarming gifts? It’s easy this way._

People who barricade doors feel one of several different ways, all somewhere on the spectrum of fear. Simon’s got bike chains for arms, fingers for keys, teeth for skewers; probably afraid he’ll carve someone to bits. Like a freak accident, like a meth lab explosion or a three-headed dog. Honed down to something that will spit in the faces of people who tell him they love him. He mouths it: _I love you. I love you._

He stops pushing and gets to his knees. He rests his head against the door, not speaking but breathing heavy and trying to listen for something. Simon is throwing things around in impotent frustration, cursing under his breath.

Simon told him about the teenage years he spent never coming down from his room except for meals (sometimes not even then).

Jaundiced old men who have about twenty bolts lined up on every entryway, denticles down the gums of their doorframe. Crotchety life-support head cases murmuring about the double agents watching, on their porch, dark figures under the dogwood and chestnut. He was too young for this. _God, let me in, Simon._

The next sound, oddly enough, is something like gasping. Simon is trying to pull air into his parched lungs, the dead things gasping in his ribcage like a Palestinian desert, like the toothy smiles of Salem and Alexandria. Saying “I can’t breathe. I can’t…”

It doesn’t matter. His lungs don’t work, but the memory remains. The mindless repetition of breathing gone. The brain thinks it’s suffocating when fight or flight kicks in and it’s all _run, fight, breathe, get some oxygen into those veins._

“Count backwards from one hundred. Start doing it in your head.” All the leaflets he’s read for anxiety disorders, phobias, the way the body likes to pretend its own thyroid is trying to drown you just to have a culprit, to _feel_ something as the war of attrition turns you inside out while promising you you’re all well and good. It’s useless, now. It’s not like Kieren could even help himself before. He’s no breathalyser hercules, orpheus armed with a dime store mirror.

“It’s all in your head.” Kieren knows this never helps. _It isn’t though, is it? It’s the opposite._ He tries again. “I mean… it’s more real than anyone will ever know. And I know it’s killing you and I’m sorry. I know you were hurt years ago and it still hurts, now.”

Simon is knocking his skull against the wall in frustration. Scuffing his feet, pushing his heels into the muffled plaster. Back to Kieren, now, on the other side of the wall. Maybe he can force his way into the soma of something that can feel pain. Anything, anything but to be trapped like a fly in amber; no narcotics, no needle-sting.

Kieren watched a lot of Americana type movies as a kid. There’s always a man who dies of coronary thrombosis on a hotel bedspread. No one finds him until the maid smells his rotting brains. Neon lighting, soft pink pool tiles, “do not disturb” sign, casino tokens littering the floor while he soaks into the upholstery like copper: a stain they'll never wash out.

He’s so enviable. Such a clean-towel, martini glass sort of death. Kieren’s never experienced that kind of oblivion, felt the yellow fear of heroin. Like a gun with a silencer, the way it empties your head of worry. _Don’t stop moving. Keep kicking the walls. If you stop moving, you might not start again._

He does, though. He finally goes silent.

“Simon.”

He feigns a long breath out. Something about it seems so real, though, when each of his limbs goes still and he drops like dead weight near the door. To the side of the heavy table and 90s era television set he’s moved in front for want of a real lock from the inside.

He’s all choked up. Outraged. Hot tears would be prickling at his eyes if it weren’t medically impossible. His tear ducts are dry. “Why does this happen, over and over again? It’s always a prophecy, with me. Someone with a crystal ball is making a sick joke with the same ending, every time they look inside. I can’t die and I can’t live and they won’t make up their mind.”

Kieren pushes the side of his head against the wall, listening to his sweltering breaths through the thin gypsum. “You aren’t doing it alone, this time.”

There’s a long silence as Kieren worries if he didn’t say the right thing, if it wasn’t enough. What are the consequences if he chooses to let Lynch do what she wants with him? Keep Simon entirely out of it. Save him. He really could save him faster.

He didn’t know until he’d considered it, how readily he’d let the scientists take him apart. Cut pieces of him like keepsakes, like Van Gogh’s ear. Gift wrap his extremities, put them in a shoe box, attach a card. His hands, tied with ribbons. His wrists, buried in tissue paper. His eyes with the words “FRAGILE." He isn’t scared.

Simon’s voice is faint, like he’s whispering. ”You want to know the first thing I thought when I saw you?” _Sitting on my grave. ‘This yours?’_ Kieren doesn’t answer. "It's not very romantic.” Kieren closes his eyes. He’s ready to hear it, whatever. Whatever the hell it is.

"You were fucking beautiful, but you were a relapse. Hanging around shaven heads and steel toed boots. I kept thinking _I won't be here long_. Why would I be? _Good, I can leave. I've built up an immunity to this sort of thing._ Laudanum-drenched sugar cubes, bitter absinthe, too much sweetener. Paragons of over-the-counter codeine deals. It never lasts."

Heroin-blooded teenagers who wet the bed, they were so terrified of their hallucinations. Trying to get higher than Jesus.

God, he was so young. His darling the junkie. Passed out on his back, being welded with a blowtorch to a bad habit.

How many times has Kieren told him miserable things while he was asleep? Saving the most caustic thoughts for when he can make up the answers. Simon's voice sounds far too much like Rick's, during these imaginary conversations.

Kieren says, “I love you.”

Simon says, “No, you want me inside of you, you want to create an omnipotence paradox in which you lift mountains more dense than black holes. You want me to be a black hole you fill with the holy spirit.”

“I love you.”

“You love sacrilege.”

“I love you.”

“You die a million deaths, you come back every three days, you expect me to dig you out of your tomb each time—and this is all you have to say to me?”

“Help me love you.”

“I can’t.”

“Help me love you.”

“I want you to tie me up and punch my jaw until I’m bleeding. I want to kneel and kiss the dirt and pretend it’s your mouth. I want you to cut the God from my flesh. I want you to kiss me so hard it drives a stake through my heart.”

“I can’t confuse love and violent worship when one is what I want and the other is what I need.” 

“This is why you’ll always be alone.”

Would he ever say that? Why would he say that? Who’s talking, Simon or Rick? Or Kieren, to himself?

 

The real Simon is talking in hushed tones. Ren’s looking down at his government-issued cotton shirt, his warm skin. By now he’s on his knees, feeling the warmth from the musty room under the door. He feels like picking his bones clean.

"You know what the number one argument against PDS parental rights is, right now? Why they're rioting to take young children from their undead parents, in court?”

Kieren exhales a breath so soft it could be a Vedic hymn.

"Cold War times, they did studies on babies in orphanages. The youngest children there were dying in their cots. Without a single doting parent to transfer her heat, hold them and give them warmth, they'd die.”

His voice is growing raw. An anchorite’s after living in the Himalayas for years. For once, his tirades are more like confessions, like an admission of guilt. Kieren hates it. It sounds like Rick, again.

Rick. Playing with knives and getting all cut up, keeping a shotgun and sawing the barrel off (he never was a good shot). Always covered in welts. Alone at night while his other mates are cutting up neighbourhood dogs. Sneaking Kieren to his father’s garage to show him all his guns, saying “Don’t blow your head off.”

Leaving things to die in the mud at the creek, pumping shotgun slugs into the trees. Maybe he started small, with shivs and water guns.

Forgive me father, for you have sinned. You, you iron belt buckle, you whisky breath. raising kids who walk blindfolded into the killing field to pick a dance partner. Raising kids who shout “faggot,” who play gunslinger dice games in the library until it gets too dangerous.

When he first found out Rick died, Kieren wasn’t much for funeral rites. What was he meant to do, dress in black and read Camus, smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth? How did victorian widows used to mourn? Black, paramatta silk dresses and frothy veils for years. They hewed tidy monuments. They kept brooches to wear, signet rings, poems carved on stone, marble urns, citations. Circlets of bright hair.

He could light grocery store candles, write the names of every dead friend on the walls of some underpass, leave pennies in fountains. What would that accomplish?

When someone dies, they used to cover all the mirrors in the house. They made coffin alarms, bells attached to headstones, in case of being buried alive.

“I wish to God I could shiver. Is it cold at night, here? I can’t tell. Maybe it will help to know.”

They say hypothermia is the most pleasant way to die. As you freeze, your body tells itself it’s warm, warm and swimming as tepid water fills your lungs. It’s pleasant, when your brain tricks you into thinking you’re fine. Some people laugh uncontrollably. Gallows humour. Heart muscle twitching, a spreading numbness. Then you fall asleep.

 

* * *

 

Kieren is led to an operating table, where he only has to sit in his pallid skin and clothes and wait for Lynch to find him. She strolls in like a maestro into an opera house, prepared to conduct the medical staff standing nearby.

“We’re going to hook you up to an encephalogram. Non-invasive, painless. Stimulate parts of your brain to get a response. Our machinery isn’t always accurate: EEGs represent only the averages of thousands of neurones. Tell us exactly what you feel.”

They clip a wire frame locked with sensors, circling round his forehead. Something from an H. R. Giger set or a sci-fi novel with martian deserts and alien probes and interstitial space. There are long wires streaming from his scalp, trailing along the floor.

Lynch adjusts the delicate equipment. She speaks to Kieren as if they’re alone in the room.

“You know, whatever we find out from you, even if we develop a cure, I’ll never get the credit. No patents, no Nobel Peace Prizes. I’m PDS, and the history books aren’t written by mutants and rabid bloodsuckers and losers of battles.” Flips switches, checks all the electrodes are in place. She holds a clipboard and murmurs something like “Go easy on him,” into the shoulder of a jittery young doctor, her head tilted away from Kieren.

She turns back to him, waiting for the monitors across the room to drone to life. “Like Marie Curie. Her own creation killed her, you know. There’s some sort of God-like symmetry to that.”

“Aren’t you the selfless mad scientist,” Kieren grumbles. The steel of the table feels cold against his neck. She pulls straps over his wrists and ankles. When he tenses, she puts up a hand to steady him. "A safety precaution."

Everyone’s in their positions, poised like a NASA space centre waiting for their rocket to buzz in: _Houston, we have a half-wired zombie brain_. Dr. Lynch motions for one of the doctors on standby to get on with it. Monitors are plastered with circles only just lighting up with kaleidoscope colours. Kieren’s keyed up insides are skewing the results already, he expects, sending electric blue brainwaves coursing through the shapes.

Lynch is still talking. “Have you ever heard of Nikola Tesla? Maybe not. He lost everything to enterprising parasites, in the end. Despite his all-consuming obsessions.”

The wires don’t his or writhe with energy. They lie still like spitting cobras. The gasping terror of the brain stem, a telephone wire up the spine sending telegrams from war, saying _arm your battalions. They’re coming for you, soldier._

“He was born at midnight, during a lightning storm. Back then, a storm during childbirth was a bad omen. But his mother was convinced he’d be a vessel of light.”

The history lesson must be to calm him down. Or maybe Lynch just likes preaching to the choir. The choir clapped in irons by the abbot, trapped in some benedictine cloister while their loved ones are held hostage.

“Tesla worked for Edison, boosting his machines. He was a only a drifting Serb who didn’t understand that the American dream was a currency short selling on a growing stock market. Edison feared him, I think, and his power over alternating currents.” Her STEM field eyes get an almost dreamy look about them.

Kieren’s scared as all hell, but at least he’s used to that by now. If he just gets through this, though, it won’t end the way he imagines when he closes his eyes. _Simon with bad blood draining his face of colour, chokers of veinlets like sables strangling his skeleton, sclera red and sore._ Maybe he can stop. Maybe Kieren’s all the data they need. _Simon’s face framed by a medicine cabinet. Simon like that girl in the hospital, thrashing on the floor and crumbling like Carrara marble, the quarry where Palla says, "Even the stones are anarchists.” Even the stones die._

He decides to let them do what they will. Somewhere in his head, he’s breaking into the vault of Simon’s brain, armed, shooting down every sick parasite feeding off of him.

Lynch turns from Ren. “Let’s see our evoked potential. Now, please.” Staff standing by pull a large glass beaker from a lab freezer, cold vapour pouring out in gusts. A foul smell fills the room as they extract it Inside is a human brain.

 

* * *

 

There’s a neighbourhood railroad, about a mile out from Roarton, where kids play chicken and dare each other to walk across when the tracks rattle. Whoever plants their feet the longest, closes the shortest distance between them and a four thousand horse-power engine, is the bravest. No one leaps in front, into the oncoming headlights.

He gets older, and the same kids go out to the rails to scream, instead, loud, as the trains shrill past. Let the spotlight slash their silhouette into splinters, long and ghost-like matchwoods. The closer you get to the train the braver you are, and they’re braver than ever. This is one of the only times Kieren is the bravest. Get close to death. Reach your arm out, the silver glow of the coyote-howl locomotive dancing off your fingertips. Just a little further.

He gets older, and against the steep bank of the train route is a mural of suicidal children’s faces and flowers from their parents. Get close to death. Come on, aren’t you brave?

“It’s okay to cry.” It’s been several long minutes, feels like hours, and Simon’s barely moved. Kieren keeps glancing at the doorknob, expecting it to be hot to the touch like when there’s fierce fire in the other room. All you can hear is the spitting wood, see the light through the cracks.

“I can’t, anyway. I’m still dead, remember?”

“You can’t produce tears. Doesn’t make a difference. Everyone cries.”

Even more than usual; he’s shining so bright; blood transfused with moonshine, bruised and put through the paper shredder. Klimt golden. Police could come to watch. Turn off their sirens and have a moment of silence for the man holding back tears. _Keep your hands where we can see them._

“I hate it, it’s pathetic. We’re not supposed to be weak, we’re survivors.” The mordant edge to his voice is like snake venom. The kind of unflossed plaque, lips to lip gristle from spare ribs that can only be taught. “I don’t want you to see me cry. And I don’t want to see you, either.” As if he’s taken an oath, already.

Kieren’s all too familiar with this scenario. A high-handed authority, teacher, father, showing him how to keep a gun in its holster. How to sprain his wrists, dislocate his thumbs, to squirm out of handcuffs; to swallow the only set of keys; to break before he can bend too far. That perfect aim is a mercy.

In the movies, there’s a stained white undershirt that all abusive dads must wear. They reek of Budweiser and sweat and live in filthy houses while beating their loyal sons half dead. For a long time, Rick’s father wore a clean shirt and mowed the lawn like a tidy cannibal. A good christian cutthroat.

“You won’t, I promise.”

When the door opens, Kieren doesn’t look at his face. He’s still standing as he pulls him into an embrace. Weaves his fingers through the hair on the back of his neck. His head falls against Kieren’s abdomen, digging into the curve of his hip. Simon isn’t breathing, but he’s shaking.

Finally, Kieren understands how people take over a plane with nothing more than boxcutters. He looks at his left forearm, wracked with guilt. The sound a metal detector makes when you forget to leave behind the heart you’ve plated in brass, the semi-automatic machine that fires of its own accord.

Simon says, “I want to go back in time and… kiss our foreheads. I want to apologise to our younger selves for what we’re about to do to them. I want to tell them to leave in the night, to just pack their things and _leave_. Everything. Roarton, everything.” Maybe the fact that they can’t cry, physically, makes the pain all that more deadly. A slow-melting glacier. The kind of erosion that kills before you realise it’s moved an inch. They hold each other tight. _I wish I had known you when I was younger_. Kieren doesn’t say it out loud. _I wish I had done everything with you, I wish I honestly believed it would have made a difference._

Kieren made a promise to tell Simon everything about himself. How when he was little he had a book full of Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings and he’d spend hours with his legs crossed in his bedroom, poring over them. When he was nine he skinned his elbow and for the first time he felt ashamed of screaming when he saw the blood. He’d imagine the blood was red paint until the crying stopped.

Magazine cut-outs, ripping up his clothes. He once wore eyeliner and his dad _hated_ it but Jem walked into the bathroom and grabbed the pencil and drew it on graceless and smudged under the lid, this defiant look in her still-wide eyes hacking the mirror to bits. When she sat down at the dinner table, their parents saw that mad glint of mutiny and never said another word about it.

“Do you think we could’ve saved each other if we met before we died? Or would we only have formed a suicide pact?”

Simon doesn’t have an answer.

 

* * *

 

“If you think I’m going to eat that…” Lynch is shaking her head. She only removes it from its container with a pair of prongs, holds it near his head. The smell begins to permeate the room, the formaldehyde and slow degradation of tissue.

“We’re going to run a current through your brain, now. Don’t be alarmed at the electrical stimulation, it’s long-term effects are nonexistent. A headache just after, at the most.”

She holds the brain up to her face, scanning it like a swab under a lens. “It’s so funny—y’know, there’s something inside the crux of your brain called the Old Brain, and it’s ancient: the most complicated thing since the milky way. The most primitive fossil inside of your cerebrum. Like the shrapnel from a dinosaur age bomb shell, spindles shooting from a slow-motion explosion.” Scientists—neurologists of some sort, probably specialising in PDS sufferers—are turning knobs and plugging a few more wires into a generator.

“That’s how immortal our ancestors are. They keep leaving pieces of themselves behind. You’re full of mementos, Kieren. Oh, how they turn you to something crude and clawing for life when push comes to shove.”

He doesn’t feel anything other than a sharp pinch, and then something familiar. Something flooding his brain, like raw opium in his bloodstream.

A matter of seconds stretches before him; aching like an inactive volcano’s tremors. The bands around his wrists feel tighter and the density of his atoms so close-packed he's collapsing into a black hole, crunching together into wadded paper. The hunger pains are debilitating.

That’s when his pupils dilate. An acidic tastelessness rises in his throat as he glowers at the personnel standing very still around him, watching. They’ve been observing intently from the beginning, he realises. This is what it feels to be human and then rabid at the flick of a switch.

And, suddenly, there he is. His line of site quavering around the brownout supermarket full of dead shopper’s trolleys. Prosaic light flickering over a pile of discarded magazines and boxes of cereal, a ragged army surplus coat, and… a corpse. Cans of soup and an opened bag of flour like he’d holed himself up there for a long time and searched for whatever hadn’t spoiled. Now he’s cracked open. And Kieren, Kieren’s got a mouth like the Manhattan Project; plutonium and uranium sites tensile across his weaponised spine, and he’s walking back through hell.

Lynch has been talking, plodding through words like sludge. “After Tesla quit, Edison launched a smear campaign to defame him. He hooked an alternating current motor to a metal platform and placed a dog on it in front of an audience. ‘Behold the danger,’ he said, and flipped the switch as electricity flowed to the plate, igniting neurones and minerals. The dog reeled and swayed and fell dead, and the crowd gasped.” _Everyone here is out to kill me. Everything here is a different manifestation of meat_. His peripheral vision goes brighter, more colourful, and he begins grinding his teeth. Are they sharpening to wolfish points, or is that his imagination?

He struggles against the restraints. The smell of the brains fill his every sensory faculty. He snaps and bites like something lupine. Amy is cradling the corpse’s head, cracking his skull with her fist and trying to get inside in that way he remembers so well, now. It’s beautiful, like peeling a fruit and watching the juices ooze into his palms in all those tender colours. Blackberries ground to pulp in a child’s eager fist. He’s always so _hungry_. Why did he ever choose to sobriety—abstention—when he was alive? Biting back the hunger. Hasn’t he gotten tired of it, yet?

Lynch is composed, relaxed, like she’s done this a thousand times. “He charged mercury to emit an ultraviolet light that bounced off phosphor-lined glass, effulgent, before the fluorescent tube burnt out.” Hatred fills his gut. Hunger replaces the fear, and it’s bliss. Kieren’s aware he’s grinning. The _smell_. Could he always catch the scent of this fetor, this stench, this rotten aroma?

“He funnelled Niagara River into an alternating current generator that electrified street cars, a layer of static over everything. Vacuum tube lights, wireless phones. People made speeches for him, saying, ‘God is a dynamo sifting humans into energy, using earth as a conductor responsive as a tuning fork. God is an x-ray beam. God said 'Let Tesla be' and all was light.’”

His image of Lynch is twisted; she looks suddenly gigantic, her eyes bright like halos or prophets who have seen light. God is an earthquake machine. God is a neon lamp. God is a death ray. Kieren is reaching toward the suspended brain. Like a moving train wreathed with light. Like a magnetic field. God is cerebral blood flow. God is the midbrain, the encephalon.

“He created lightning from a two-hundred foot antenna joined to a coil funnelling electricity from the earth. Imagine: the light bulbs flickering, electrostatic sparking off the cobblestones, grass hissing, the blue haze. The surge blew out a power station, creating a city-wide blackout.”

As if hit by a passing monorail car, Kieren recoils and slams shut his mind. _This isn’t what you want. Don’t you remember, Jem with a gun at the heel of her hand: a soldier knelt at the banks of the Vistula, a mother to her waist in the Ganges, a fighter on the Rue Saint-Jacques with a cross to her chest? The barrel shaking, her whole arm trembling like bodies in the trenches of the somme?_ The image of the corpse fades as he forces himself to stop breathing the rancid scent.

Lynch looks into his face so hopefully he feels sick to his stomach. It doesn’t matter, he realises as his head clears. Whatever it was, he fought it. He fought himself and won.

A steady alarm must have been going off the entire time, and he only now notices when it goes silent and the dashes and furrows in the charts on-screen stabilise. The machines go dead quiet.

Muffled gasps of "My God," and "I _knew_ it. I knew he was the one to change everything,” permeate the silence. The tone of their voice makes him feel sick, the way he feels sick when Simon looks at him like he's thinking _I thought you were Isaac and I was Abraham but now I know you're God._ Lynch keeps going, though his tolerance to whatever they did to him, the psychoactive equivalent of blue oblivion (except it was so much stronger, wasn't it?) seems to have been a shock. She works through it as if following a script, as if she had planned for this. "He wanted to transmit wireless electricity between the ground’s fluid vibration and the ionosphere, where solar radiation tears electrons out of molecules. The resonant frequency between these two points was six to eight hertz—the same frequency as flowers, alpha waves in the human brain, the ionosphere. He didn’t know that all biological systems vibrate at the same rate."

Someone says, "That's never happened before. It's a miracle."

Lynch says, "Tesla’s wireless energy was actually free-flowing everywhere and into everything.”

 

Later, alone in the office as everyone has filed out and the machines look emptied of souls, idling like a fieldstone church in an abandoned village, Lynch unlatches Kieren, checking his pupils and jugular veins for signs of any remaining aggression. She finally speaks.

“I’m sorry, Kieren, but you didn’t fight off that little attack we generated all on your own. You know that's impossible, right? Imagine, a rabid with some manners and a conscience." She laughs, high and jarring, then considers it for a moment. “Though your lack of surprise is… surprising. What’ve you been up to, you enigma?” The murky day at the graveyard, the oblivion turning the back of his throat sour. The failed resurrection, a gunshot. When he doesn’t answer, Lynch keeps going. “In that one shred of your brain that seemed to bring you back to life, I shut you off. That’s all.”

“Why did you stop?” Kieren feels a twinge of guilt at his disappointment. _What, did you really expect to be something so special?_

“Your PDS friend made a deal with us. A sort of trade-off. He truly is loyal to you, almost like a _dog_.” Kieren is sensing an overwhelming lack of fondness toward Simon from this harbinger of doom. Maybe it’s personal. Maybe she has her own grisly history of blind faith. What she doesn’t know is that Simon is different. If not Kieren, Simon. Judas, Jesus; apostle, preacher; ruler, ruled. _What has he done? I didn’t ask him to do this._

Simon is waiting for him outside, standing slanted against the wall, arms folded. Kieren walks to him quickly, anger already bubbling up.

"You shouldn't have done that." Kieren's looking at him like he's chlorine in his eyes, but Simon won't stop staring at Kieren like he's the last of his kind. _I'm surprised you can stomach me._ The hall is dark after hours. Simon looks no more bleak than usual, but looks can be deceiving. “They did tests?” Simon nods.

"What did they do to you? Wait—no, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.“

“Come on, I can handle this better than you.”

“Liar.” Kieren grips tight at Simon’s hip. He doesn’t feel it, he arches slightly. Actually leans into the spiteful touch. Like, a random act of human kindness seems so unlikely. Like he could give him a fist to his jaw and he would call it honest human touch. Give him a crowbar to his spine, and he’d call that a marriage proposal. An over-fond dog following him around. Whimpering, saying _If it makes this any better, call me Little Red Riding Hood. Call me Little Bo Peep. Call me something small and unassuming_.

“I don’t think it’s actually the blood. I kept prodding the experts, everyone was tripping on their words. They don’t think it’s anything to do with blood type.” Kieren realises they must’ve fabricated the whole story, the thing about As and Bs and O-negatives. Which means there’s hope for Simon. Or no hope for anybody.

Still, he doesn’t say that. “That—It doesn’t matter to me.” Kieren’s wringing his hands, closing and unclosing as his frustration overflows. “Are you serious? Why would that matter to me? _You_ , you mat—you shouldn’t have done that.”

“They were nothing. The tests were nothing, just questions.”

“I don’t care.” Kieren kicks him, aiming for his knees, but he blocks his foot with his foot. He blocks a half-hearted punch and grabs him gently. “ _Idiot_.” Kieren’s fist closing and unclosing is curved in his hand as Kieren pushes him against the wall, him holding both clenched in his soft, icy palms. He looks so goddamned at peace with himself.

" _Don't_ do that again. I'm spectacularly cross with you." He is livid, the heat from his breath catching in the narrow space between them. Livid at the doctors, at the supposed drones that seem more and more likely to be circling overhead, buzzards waiting for bodies to drop.

“What’re you, gonna make me?” He must get some kind of sick rush from self-sacrifice. Kieren plants an outstretched arm next to where his head’s been shoved against the crumbling plaster. Fair skin taut over Simon’s neck and collarbone as if he’s straining to keep still, so perfectly still.

“Why? What would it take?” Simon lets out a soft groan. Without realising, Kieren’s hands have found their way under his t-shirt, along his waistband. Feels him shifting like something mechanical, cold gears and gear transmissions with a pacemaker and BPM sensors. Like a polygraph test.

“What, you feel that?”

“Yeah, I definitely do.” That day on the couch, among the empire of cardboard boxes full of Amy’s things. Who could’ve known those would be the good times? Are these the good times, still? Will it only deteriorate from this point? The bad taste left by Lynch’s people leaves a bitter flavour, like he’s been drinking battery acid. Like he’s been chewing dirt. His face feels hot with anger.

At last, Simon and Kieren’s temples fall to rest against each other a mess of uncombed hair, Kier’s eyes closed and his eyelashes brushing Simon’s cheeks. Kieren is still gripping him tight and it feels as if he could both possess him and exorcise his self-destruction from himself.

That’s when they hear echoing footsteps from up the hall. “Our room’s just this way.” When Kieren takes another step, his legs nearly buckle. He realises how weary he is, of everything.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Let’s go. Hurry.” The voices of a few guards or scientists are drawing closer, talking and laughing and unsuspecting. Simon’s fingertips find themselves outside Kieren’s slender wrist, then under his thumb; the artery running closest to the skin where the two slender bones parallel each other. The easiest places to find a pulse. They feel out the way to the room, the walls touchstone-dark, made of jasper.

Behind the knee. The tender, hidden vein, beating heavily. They close the door gently, light streaming under; an augury of some veiled future, glowing softly. A soft thumping inside bend of the elbow. Where the leg meets the pelvis. On the side of the head, behind the eye. The rhythm is quickening, Kieren’s vision still hazy from the tests despite his blood running cold since he turned. Warmth. In the soft hollow next to the vocal cords. the neck under the back of the jaw, where the blood goes from the heart to the brain.

There are seven places to check a pulse. There are seven seals to break and open hell. They always did try their hardest to depose God, Kieren and Simon.

 

* * *

 

The pre-Eastern-Bloc West was full of combat babies told exactly what to keep in their fallout shelters and how long they’d have to stay there after they’d won the war. Everyone’s grandparents, where Kieren’s from, all of them are nostalgic for that time when gods and monsters were things you can see. You could put your fist to the sky and scream _fuck you, commies! fuck you, missiles!_ and there was a divine order to it. These kids nursed on fables of the free world; they had more food than anyone in history, anywhere, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in their milk from nuclear testing. Saying: _Alas, Babylon. We’re doomed! Now, let’s go—straight to the movie theatre!_

Back then, before the Cold War, everyone's idea of the future was tourists snapping Kodak prints of the six moons of Procyon IV and a Chevrolet JetCar assembly line on Sirius III. Sputnik hadn't been launched and anything was possible: Tesco on the moon, Cola-powered streetlights all the way down Sunset Boulevard. Lead poisoning was as much a myth as inflation or lung cancer. No one was watching horror movies because no one was scared. The Western world was invincible—a star-spangled hero with winged feet—and all anyone cared about were demigods and men with capes.

That was the world before The Rising. Even though during the apocalypse casualty levels were inconceivably low, spirits were high and people were resilient, there was still the reminder that the balance was fragile and to keep alive, people would need to lay egg shells. Set bear traps in their front yards.

Anyway, Kieren always knew the world wasn't going to end just cause humans were fuck-ups, although that’d be easier. He thought, it’d probably be pretty, like a polluted sunset. Everyone will get to see colours through a smokescreen, nebular and limpid like a Jackson Pollock. Dust storms in LA and Sidney turning the sky ballroom blitz orange like in the middle of the Swinging Sixties.

Strangeletes turning particles into stable copies of themselves, until all matter becomes the same throughout. Acid oceans. Dysgenic pressures.

So what, he’s got a list of every Armageddon in the books. Even the biblical ones: water turned to blood, storms of fire, locusts, lice.

Simon’s got a list of all the possible last words he might’ve said before he bit it. Cause he doesn’t remember, he guesses at what might have been hallucinations, every newspaper clipping from every obituary that occurred close to his hometown. Maybe one was an old friend, maybe they know an old friend who heard him. He’s got everything from “Dante threw the hypocrites into the eight circle of hell, between suicides and traitors against God. Lets see how many tiers I can touch,” to “kill me already,” to “stop grieving for evil people, you fuck,” to “I’ll sleep it off and be fine in the morning.”

Here they are, generation _whatever the fuck_ and maybe they’re a little self-centred, believing they’ve finally met their Waterloo and finally soared high enough for God to never forgive them. But it isn’t like anyone can blame them. Kieren still has his ‘end of the world’ list tucked somewhere in one of his sketch books. Simon never wrote his down, but he remembers. He remembers every goddamn item.

 

* * *

 

Kieren wakes late, long after the sun has turned the smoky sky stale. Simon’s still asleep, which is surprising.

There’s another note slipped under the door, with Kieren’s name and Kieren’s name only on the folded paper. He feels as if he needs to hold his breath to open it. It’s cheap printer paper, creases military stiff. It reads:

_You have a new opportunity to help us._

_I recognise that this has been a challenge for you. As well as your friend. Before you accuse us of going behind your back, know that as long as you aren't willing to consent to something more rigorous, using both of you and comparing your results is our best option._

_However, if you choose to go further, we may be able to exclude Simon Monroe from the tests. This option is only available for as long as you show up, first thing in the morning, every morning, in the same location as yesterday. We’ll discuss your options there._

_Dr. Bailey Lynch_

Kieren doesn’t even need a moment to consider it.

 

 

“I want to know the details of everything you’ve done to Simon. After that, I’ll do pretty much anything. As long as you leave him alone.” Lynch barely has time to open her mouth, likely to complain about the late hour at which he finally manages to show up.

The silence sticks around, a welcome guest. _Good. That sounded determined enough. Not like a petulant child demanding an allowance. More adamant._

Kieren hates the wallpaper in this room. They’ve converted it to another digital-based lab and it seems off-kilter and devoid of furniture, exposing old outlets, wires, and an ugly paisley pattern.

Lynch stands stiffly without a real chair in the vacuum-like space. Opens and closes her mouth. ”Sure. You know what you signed on for. We're totally transparent. You want test results? You want video footage? You want records?”

What’s she playing at? He knows they’ve been nothing but sly and unpredictable. She knows what he knows. She doesn’t seem one to underestimate anyone, not even her lab puppets, her feeble servants. ”Yes. I do."

"You won't be happy with what you find. The encephalon trial had a subdued effect on you. D'you think you can stomach what Simon Monroe—fresh zombie meat—does with the same variables? His neurones lit up like a cathode ray." So his tests are mirroring Kieren's. They didn't mention that. Simon didn't mention that, but Kieren guesses he should have known.

"I've killed people. I can stomach myself, I can handle anything."

"Have you asked him how many he's killed? If he killed anyone in the lab, just yesterday?”

"You're a liar.”

"Watch the tapes, if you're so gallant and trusting.”

She offers him a compact disc in a plastic case. He takes it, though it feels like a contaminant he’d rather dispose of than touch. Snatches it from her fingers like a burden. He won’t watch it. He refuses to, though he should keep a copy just in case. In case of what, he doesn’t know.

 _I'll keep hold of it for a while, think about it, then take a mallet to it. Snap it in half. Simon's the first person I trust, and the last._ His hands grip it tighter and tighter at his side. _Who cares if he tore someone apart? This is a ploy to divide us, anyway. I don't care. We all killed during the rising. It doesn't matter._ He hates how far this is, out of their control. The corners of his mouth stay still as infantry formations. Saying, to himself, _This is our inheritance? Staying in our mother's closets until the sun comes up, thinking "she would never be this weak"? We reap the harvest that is a brain tumour, a Cotard's case study. How could they do this to us? How could they leave us the scraps? Ours is not the chosen generation, ours is the end of a long line._ He’s thinking, _Gee, I wish we had one of them Doomsday Machines._

Lynch gets very close to him, too close, invading the space next to his ear. "You think we don't know what's happening? Between you two _friends_?” She hisses the last word like it’s grotesque. “Normally, we would be uninvolved. But I'm worried you wouldn't sleep so easily next to someone who slaughtered his own mother.”

There it is: the image of a rabid Simon crawling back to his doorstep like a homing pigeon, drawn to the polestar of his childhood home, scratching at the door and windows, ripping at a window screen, barring his teeth and slowly, very slowly, finding his parent’s bedroom door left ajar…

No. He isn’t going to do this. He could’ve easily hurt or killed Jem. It’s no mystery now why Simon never talked about his parents. An ache sharp enough to be a broadsword rips through him at the thought of how Simon must have heard the news for the first time, the loathing for himself he endured for months, years, at the thought. _Oh, God. Oh, God, no_. Self-malice, self-mutilation; Kieren’s old arch nemeses and now a shared madness, a folie à deux. He’s struck with the delusional belief that they could safe each other, or that they already have.

_See, it doesn’t work that way, Lynch. They tell you to beat swords into ploughshares, but they’ve never been broken and bruised until half your life seeps away just trying to pull yourself up. You can’t tear us apart. It’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long. We’re invincible. We already know that love between monsters is blasphemy, that they would slaughter us in our sleep._

Kieren fingers the bruises on his arm, dark and harlequin, now red and flushing around his cut. He’s going to need a bandage for it, soon—now that his blood’s back to its regular flow. _We did everything right, and still. This._

Let Lynch believe she’s won. Kieren says, “Are we going to get this over with, or not?”

“Good choice.”

 

* * *

 

On Simon’s Last Words list, he’s got, “Will atlas take the world from our shoulders?” Next is “Love is colour-blind, pock-marked, pigeon-toed, hemmed with animal parts. Love’s got a degenerative disease and two glass eyes, so it can’t possibly find me, not alive. That’s okay, love. I don’t mind.”

Maybe it was a girl’s name from his life before. A girlfriend or boyfriend: Lorry, Pam (Lorazepam). Fen (Fentanyl).

Maybe the words on his lips were some last true love. Celia (Celexa). Patrick (Paxil). Zoe (Zoloft). People. Prescriptions. Indeterminable.

He used to rehearse for death the way people rehearse for piano recitals. Brushing his hands over the keys, filling his pockets with stones and wading out to the sea. He’d keep his organ donor card next to his last will and testament, folded his pocket. He dreamt of sleeping in an undertaker’s freezer, in the swathe of that chalky rime.

Kieren keeps telling him this story about the times he spent in Rick’s attic, looking through old junk. Hearing the death knell of Bill’s target practice. He keeps telling him how there was an old man in Roarton who would dig graves for all the dogs at his family farm months before any died, so they could be buried in the frozen ground if they passed in the middle of winter.

Constantly, he gets this feeling someone is walking on his next grave. Like it might be himself.

 

* * *

 

It feels like it’s been about five minutes, but for all he knows it’s been hours. It started with the usual routine, the machine, the wires.

Lynch is more solemn this time, and the blinds are drawn. The outside world a satin curtain.

This time, it feels different. The feeling of rabidity comes again, in a wave, his arms struggling against the restraints. It feels more mild. But Lynch doesn’t let him go, she holds him there for long minutes. Then, with one swift push of a dial, he shuts down. Like he’s full of opiates. The feeling people must get just before they finally drown, after their lungs have stopped burning. This time his hands are turning cold. It could just be some psychosomatic remnant, but he could swear he’s growing more and more like a cadaver. Self-digestion, that’s the first stage of decomposition. If he pulled at his skin, it could come right off.

“What were you expecting? Were you expecting something easy?”

The other scientist is writing madly, looking back at temperature records and multiple linear graphs recording who knows what. They seem to be sloping down.

“No… no, no, no. This feels like…” Putrefaction. The body breaking down. Back to its old state.

“We’ve found it. The location.” He’s motioning with a pen to a red dot on the brain diagram. “He’s not going rabid. He’s regressing. Dying.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve built a sort of immunity to this, Kieren. You won’t stay dead, not for long.” _Immunity? But I’m no different, I’m only lucky._ That’s been proven to me time and time again. “I’m sorry, but I lied. You really do have a gift for suppressing rabidity; I’ve never seen it before and I could never hope to find it again.”

“This isn’t right.” He lurches and grabs at his stomach. It doesn’t ache but all he can feel are the larvae and blowflies; the insect eggs that get inside of everything that dies. That had to have happened to him before he came back to life, all it takes is a few days. They complete the cycle. Autolysis, cells destroyed by their own enzymes. He just got it wrong, got it inside out.

_They’re never going to stop, are they? They’re not done with me, they’re not done with Simon. What do they need this for, what will this information give them?_

Nobody stops him as he pulls himself from the chair and escapes from the room.

He wanders for five minutes, an hour, it’s hard to tell the difference and his internal compass loses the bedroom completely in the nullity of being all but neurologically deceased. Again.

He finds a room with whole panels of dials. He presses every button he can find. A few lights start blinking, then an alarm goes. Wailing _beep beep beep_ as he stumbles from the control room to the hall. He tries to force open every locked door he can find. A double-door leading outside, with two small windows revealing the evening on its last legs, the high-intensity lights on the field in the fenceline. It’s locked. _Too many locked doors. Too many, many safes and not enough safe-crackers. Beep. Beep beep._

There are red beams spinning in sync with the alarm every ten feet in the hall. Fire sprinklers neglected after the centre was abandoned tick and spin uselessly, water dripping rather than showering into the floor covering. It takes a few turns before Kieren finds a single door that gives and leads into an unlit back-room with a panel-board feeding into circuits, a water heater, old toolboxes. There’s an unlocked window Kieren manages to climb through, onto the tarmac and into the biting night air.

 _I’m going to find a place to hide, then get Simon. We don’t have anything to pack. We can leave._ He takes cover under a row of caged windows, under a gutter overgrown with clover and blindweed. He can hear his own breaths, ragged and determined, and they sound foreign to him, magnified several decibels coming from a loudspeaker miles away.

That’s when a light pools very suddenly over him, like a search beam seeking paratroopers in the hostile night.

He shields his eyes. There are shadows all around him, more figures armoured as if by riot gear or bombproof rigs, but they aren’t The Patrol. There are too many, far too prepared, facing to the entrances of the centre as if averse to letting anything out rather than in. _Oh, you sad monsters, caged by your guardian angels. You thought the world was terrible, not you. Never you. They’ll kill you if you escape._

No one’s seen him yet, by some miracle. The shock of the militarised legions just outside, probably armed from the beginning, sends a ripple through him. There have to be about a hundred, fifty feet from the walls. He slinks back through the door.

 

“We have to go. Now.”

Simon’s foggy eyes shudder open in the pitch-dark room as Kieren fumbles among his books and papers to grab a few stray drawings and fold them into his pockets. Kalnienkian vision clouts the faint lights to and fro in front of him. Simon is already wide awake. Kieren swells with sudden, bleeding affection. Somewhere in the Apostle’s Creed are the words: _you are a holy grail and I’m the blood spilling out. Quit telling me how much God loves everybody. I defy godhood. Exiled, I walk on your kingdom’s border._

“Outside? What’s happened? Are we leaving?” Kieren’s silence is the most dour confirmation.

Simon pulls himself up, begins lacing his shoes. He forces the extra jumper over Kieren’s head. Kieren has only just realised how seriously every inch of him is shaking. He’s scuffed his palms and they’re practically bleeding but he seems to be in shock. As an afterthought, he grabs the CD with the tapes from Simon’s experiment.

“What’s happened?” Simon’s voice now is barely an exhale. “Kieren, you’re cold again.”

Kieren is already opening the door and retracing his steps to the closet with the exit. He ties the bundle of belongings with a stray wire he pulls from the wall with a dull crackling and throws it through the window and follows after it.

Simon climbs out without another word. The moment he sees the battalions of patrol officers, he stops runs a hand through his hair. “Christ… what are they all for? There are so many, Kier. Why are there so many?”

“Wild guess.” Kieren ducks, grabbing his arm and pulling him out of a plash of light hurtling across the slate wall. His hand scrapes on the rough tarmac. Since when was he so good at fleet jailbreaks?

“Okay, we’re going to make a run for it into the forest. Roarton’s actually pretty close. Just got to make it through the woods.” Anyone other than Simon wouldn’t dare put faith in the half-baked escape plan. At the last minute they grip at each other’s fingers, Kieren leading. He can’t feel the cold, the coldness of Simon’s hands. If anything, they’re warmer than his, now. With the last bit of sensation he has lingering on his fingertips, he swears they’re warm. Maybe it’s only the benumbedness of someone pinned in the doorway between earth and hell.

 _Kieren, you’re cold again._ Why is that phrase sticking in his mind? _Kieren, you’re cold again._ He’ll tell Simon later, what happened. That he’ll warm up, maybe in a few hours. Maybe in a few days. Even if he doesn’t, it’s only as unbearable as it was to be trapped inside himself in the months he was PDS.

They make it to the fence without a problem by keeping low and moving fast. Kieren begins looking to the bottom of the fence, scanning it in ever direction.

“There’s a hole somewhere here. I saw it the first day we were here.”

They circle around, crouching and keeping their hands to the fence where it’s hard to see. For one terrifying second, Kieren’s reaching hands grab at nothing and rather fall through thin air. That’s when he finds the gap.

He silently crawls through and waits on the other side. When Simon gets half-way through, they hear one of The Patrol shouting. They’ve spotted them.

“ _Hey, you!_ You’re to be held in the Centre until threat of disease is neutralised. Where’re ye goin’? Hey, rotters, stand still and _put yer hands where I can see ‘em_!” They hear the hiss of a taser coming to life. Simon turns blue, looks chilled to the bone and goes rigid, and Kieren has to pull him through with all the strength he has left. There’s no way he’s going back, now.

“Run, Simon. Run.” He looks as if he’s been punched in the gut, but he slowly gains speed. Soon, they’re hurtling through the needle-like branches as dead foliage crunches under their feet.

_We’re dead, and everything is fine. It’s doomsday and we’re living happily ever after. Let’s pretend we’ve got fifty years left of this. Maybe thirty-five. One hundred twenty years holding hands. You are a pious site. You’re fucking Rome. Two years before a self-imposed exile. Eight years to Peregrinatio Sancti Petri. Seven hundred years before the pilgrimage from our homeland._

_Time is irrelevant._

_Nothing can kill us, we’re already dead._

The guard doesn’t follow them past the fence, which is bewildering and a bit worrying. Kieren’s lost in thought. Decides that in every life, in every time stream, he will always find Simon. He will always kiss him, run for him. He will always run far away. Gather his belongings, throw them in a burlap sack like a refugee troubadour. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés will lay Tenochtitlán to waste, whatever. Adrian will be blown to pieces again. Jerusalem gets another nail in the coffin. Nietzsche’s gramophone record, whatever, who cares. When it ends, the Old One plays it again. Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. He knows better than anyone, the dead don’t stay dead long.

The way the forest looks, it’s like something from some Netherlandish folklore; one where you’re meant to watch out for old women and young men. A witch sometimes dispenses advice, sometimes eats you for dinner, sometimes turns your loved ones to stone. Haunted sycamores, sweet chestnuts, fallen ashes. It feels like reanimation, to be among living things at last, though they’ve been petrified by the early hoarfrost and the stiff, arctic night. That cold is still only just seeping out of Kieren.

Then it hits him.

“Simon.” He’s stopped dead in his tracks.

“Hmm?” Simon looks oddly at home. Anywhere wiccan, pagan, looking dark like a mythos where children get eaten by trees and things come back from the dead. Both a child lost during a full moon and an over-sentimental werewolf. Stepping from crag to outcrop, unsure. Like dogs wandering round a country house wondering what all the holes are for.

“How could you feel that—how could you tell I was cold?” There’s a long silence. Simon looks down in mystification at his hands. “How could you tell? _I know you can’t feel, how the hell could you tell?”_ Something inside of him swells with toxic hope.

“Um…” He feels at his face, he reaches to a nearby tree and places a hand on the gnarled yew branch swelling from its trunk. It looks frosted over and neolithic, like flint, like it could be ice cold. Simon grins—very slowly turning up the corners of his mouth, almost spooked. His eyes glint in the doleful dark, and he _shivers_.

“No way.” It sounds ridiculous the moment it leaves his throat. Simon is already laughing, and it’s transcendental the way an exotic foreign language is in the precious few times you hear it out loud. “Yeah. Yeah, I can feel that.”

 _Jesus Christ, he’s coming alive and I might as well have transfused my blood into his, he’s taken what life I had left and I am so willing to give it to him. I think I must be absolved._ For some reason, he thinks of the Last Words list. The items that make him feel like he’s carrying bricks, like Simon’s bloodshot and glassy-eyed and knocking on death’s door.

The last three:

“There isn’t a light and I’m afraid.”

“Unless heaven is one long high, I’m gonna have built up one hell of a tolerance to Elysium.”

“Maybe I’ve been dead and I’m just now waking up.”

It could be the pinewood sea smoke rising from the brittle verglas earth, but Kieren swears he can see the warm mist of Simon’s breath.


End file.
